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Paper short abstract

This paper traces how a German care innovation project mobilizes 'lighthouse' imaginaries to guide data-driven futures. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that practices of active waiting reveal different 'meantimes', making the lighthouse meaningful for some, invisible for others.

Paper long abstract

How do ‘lighthouse’ imaginaries illuminate – and obscure – care futures in the meantime, and who gets to be represented in their beam? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a large-scale health and elderly care digitalization project, we investigate the multi-layered meanings and ‘meantimes’ of healthcare data practices. The project is situated in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, a former coal-mining, and GDR region facing a severe care crisis. As part of ‘structural transformation’ initiatives, the project supports start-ups and research groups to co-create technological innovations and data-driven care ‘solutions’ with elderly citizens, scientists, developers, and policymakers. It aims to develop scalable solutions, transforming the region from a crisis site into a future care model.

A central image used to explain and market the project to the public is the lighthouse, which works as temporal and spatial metaphor. Digital tools and data collected in the present shine their light into a nearby future, but also to other regions experiencing similar care crises. However, the lighthouse works temporally in multiple directions: it reframes past hardships as capacity for transformation while shining from an imagined future onto present practices. Yet it remains unclear whose data, experiences, and imaginaries are included in the lighthouse’s beam. In our paper, we analyse how participants’ active waiting for a bright future takes different forms like experimenting with data-driven tools or navigating aging itself. We argue that the divergent temporalities inherent in these practices point to different meantimes altogether, affecting whether and for whom the lighthouse appears real or remains invisible.