Paper short abstract:

Digital Care Technologies can foster autonomy, but they also reshape the sociocultural understanding of age and care. The paper examines how age and autonomy are reconfigured in the emergence of digital care technologies in older people’s homes and everyday lives.

Paper long abstract:

The digitisation of age has become a central field of innovation and active ageing policies. Therein, autonomy-enabling technologies should (1) support older people in ageing in place independently, (2) meet the growing needs for care at home, and (3)reduce the work load of caregivers. Therein, they seem to be cost-reductionist instruments and at the same time they present a promising sales market. What is left out in this narration is the question, how age and care are reconfigured by the implementation and use of digital care technologies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork the paper takes on a microanalytical perspective following the practices of users* and technologies in their everyday negotiation of what it means to become old with the help of digital care technologies. The ethnographic description points out the affective, embodied and intra-active practices of both older users* and technology, in which new spaces of age and care are co-produced. In these sociomaterial entanglements age and care are fluid phenomena depending on subjectivity, materiality and power. From a feminist cultural anthropologist perspective, the paper suggests how age and care can be thought of differently by bringing the practices and subjectivities of older users* into sight and give them a voice in the discourse of innovation and active ageing policies.