Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores how informal elderly care is provided in Indian transnational families by using generic, everyday information and communication technologies (ICTs), and how the elderly are actively involved in co-constructing caring practices at a distance.

Paper long abstract:

In both popular and academic discourses, elderly people are often assumed to be care recipients, dependent on support of other people as well as, increasingly, technologies. In contexts where adult children, who tend to (be expected to) provide most care for their elderly parents, move far away for work, the elderly are frequently seen as having been "abandoned" by their closest kin. Another supposition is that the elderly are or could not be the users of novel technologies such as mobile phones and computers simply because of their age. My extensive fieldwork among the elderly in Kerala, India, puts such stereotypes under question and shows that the experience the elderly have with ICTs in care is much more nuanced. Rather than focusing on technologies specifically designed for elderly care, I explore how everyday ICTs are used in elderly care in Indian transnational families, in which adult children migrate abroad. In this presentation, I give examples of how informal elderly care at a distance is co-constructed by family members living in different countries and using ICTs. Rather than being helpless, abandoned and technology-phobic, many elderly in my study were actively involved in caring practices at a distance, taking care of both their children and grand-children living far away by using (mobile) phones, social media websites and Internet-based webcams. I suggest that researching the use of the already existing, generic ICTs is a fruitful way to explore what technology may (not) do for elderly care and caring practices.