Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper proposes using design fiction to surface competing sociotechnical imaginaries of "quality robotic care" in China's eldercare sector. It will explore how industry, policy, and care workers construct divergent and often incommensurable, visions of what robotic care should look like.

Paper long abstract

As China accelerates the development of care robots in eldercare settings, driven by demographic pressure, state-led technological ambition, and market logics, the question of what constitutes "good" or "quality" robotic care remains deeply unsettled. This paper proposes an inquiry into how different stakeholders, including robotics companies, policymakers, eldercare facility managers, and frontline care workers, construct competing imaginaries of robotic care futures.

This paper examines a layered vocabulary for analysing competing care futures. Rather than applying sociotechnical imaginaries uniformly across all stakeholders, it argues that different analytical concepts are needed for different registers of future-making: sociotechnical imaginaries for state and industry visions; radical imaginaries (Castoriadis, 1987; Vallès-Peris and Domènech, 2020) for emergent counter-visions; and hope, fear, and affect (Groves, 2011) for the individual orientations of care recipients. Extending Hess’s (2016) concept of ‘undone science’, the paper introduces the notion of undone imaginaries, which is, future orientations that are never given institutional scaffolding, not because they lack coherence, but because the actors who hold them lack power.

Methodologically, the paper will employ a combination of ethnographic methods and speculative approaches. Alongside interviews and participant observation across care settings and industry sites, design fiction will be used as a participatory tool: near-future narrative scenarios involving care robots will be co-constructed with stakeholders to render implicit assumptions explicit and open to contestation (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Auger, 2013). This multi-method approach presents reflexive, participatory methods for caring world-making, while contributing a distinctly non-Western context underrepresented in STS care scholarship.