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Short abstract

Welfare states deploy assistive technologies for aging populations, but UK and Norway homecare policies reveal a double move: immigration is shaped as demographic crisis while solutions assume a default, unmarked user, marginalizing migrant realities through inclusion, not absence.

Long abstract

Contemporary welfare states are investing heavily in assistive technologies to address impending crises of aging populations, and healthcare financing and infrastructure. This paper examines home care policy documents in the UK and Norway to understand how welfare technologies are articulated and configured within broader political and economic projects, and to explore where their rationales converge and where they diverge. Informed by STS scholarship on sociotechnical imaginaries and the performativity of policy texts, we treat these documents as enacting particular realities rather than describing them: creating the future as the location of problems and the home as the location of solutions. In this performative mode, we investigate how immigrants are enacted in policy, not as absent or invisible, but through a specific kind of inclusion. Despite contrasting economic and political aspirations, we argue that both policy landscapes perform the same double move: immigration performs demographic urgency while solutions embed technologies built around an assumed default user whose home, family structure and relationship to the welfare state reflects a particular, unmarked norm. This paper presents work in progress contributing to STS scholarship and renewed research interests on homecare technologies within welfare societies across transnational and migratory contexts.