Care Studies and After: experimenting with materials, methods, and sites 

Abstracts

The care practices of robotics

by Maria Arnelid, Linköping University

My research explores how future elder care work is imagined in Sweden today. However, it does not take place in elder care homes but rather in the context of robotics research aimed at developing ‘care robots’. Drawing on ethnographic material describing my participation in the development and testing of the robot Furhat for elder care, I argue for an understanding of this work not solely as a planning for future care practices, but as a constellation of care practices in its own right. In analyzing the development of care robots, I pay attention to the work of defining ‘good’ robotic care and the continuous ‘tinkering’ (Mol, Pols, and Moser 2010) involved in materializing imaginaries of robotic care through programming and testing. In this paper, I focus specifically on the work required to set the robot up for testing, to control and operate the robot as it interacts with participants, and to manage breakdowns and failure. I discuss how this work, which is often made invisible, can be conceived of as ‘caring for robots’ (Lipp 2022). By considering the testing of caring robots in terms of care practices I also want to address issues of temporality. With this I mean that care robotics largely builds on ‘robotic imaginaries’ of future care work (Suchman 2007; Rhee 2018). However, through the development and testing of the robots, these imaginaries are continuously materialized. In other words, the care robot operates simultaneously in the “realm of speculation (…) and of materiality” (Rhee 2018, p. 6).

References
Lipp, Benjamin (2022). “Caring for robots: How care comes to matter in human-machine inter-
facing”. In: Social Studies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221081446.
Mol, Annemarie, Jeannette Pols, and Ingunn Moser (2010). Care in practice. transcript Verlag.
Rhee, Jennifer (2018). The robotic imaginary: The human and the price of dehumanized labor.
U of Minnesota Press.
Suchman, Lucy (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actio) 

Exploring care in relation to the use of video consultations in general practice

by Elisabeth Assing Hvidt, University of Southern Denmark, with Elle Lüchau, Finn Olesen, Helen Atherton, Jens Søndergaard, Elisabeth Assing Hvidt

In this article, we explore how care is distributed in relation to general practitioners’ (GP) video consultation practices. Video consultations were introduced in general practice in 2020 and by the end of 2024, all GPs must offer video consultations, thus giving video consultations a central role in Danish general practice. Yet, little is known about how video consultations affect GPs’ care. To address this, the first author conducted interviews with GPs (N=27) and their staff (N=4) and carried out 133 hours of multi-sited fieldwork in seven clinics across Denmark. In our analytical process, using reflexive thematic analysis, we turned to philosophers of care: Annemarie Mol’s (2008) concept of “logic of care” and Jeanette Pols’ (2010) term “fitting logics” as frameworks for analyzing various ways of interpreting care in the context of video consultation use. Based on GPs’ experiences, we find that in the use of video consultations care is distributed through three interrelated logics of 1) patient service 2) maintaining the system, and 3) protecting oneself. GPs experience to care for patients by offering increased access, flexibility, convenience and efficiency, yielding high patient satisfaction. Moreover, GPs use video consultations to protect themselves from exhaustion and to increase their mental resources to care for their patients. Consequently, for some GPs, video consultations increase their job satisfaction and support a sustainable running of their clinic and thus the healthcare system. Based on these findings, we encourage an increased focus on how video consultations reciprocally condition and shape contemporary care practices.

Care and the river flow: looking at care through insights from Daoism

by Anne Blanchard, Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities/ University of Bergen

The motivation for submitting this abstract lies in the tensions and ambivalences I have been feeling in reflecting on what it entails to do narrative research with care among local communities in Greenland. The project (called SeMPER-Arctic, initiated in 2020 and funded under a Belmont Forum framework) looks at narratives of change in the Arctic in a decolonial and reflexive spirit, and is interested in seeing how sense-making, place-attachment and extended networks might relate to Arctic resilience.

In the project, care is strongly articulated around ‘slow’ and compassionate science, walking ‘softly’ through fieldwork, and listening ‘deeply’ to neglected narratives (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011), in order to avoid imposing dominant western paradigms in shaping the future of the Arctic, and to look at the history of practices that have led to local, systemic inequalities that might prevent resilience.

However, ambivalences arise when looking at ancient Chinese philosophy (from the foundational Daoist texts Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi, to readings by for instance Watts, 1951 and 1975), and in particular the core concept of non-action (wu wei), which can briefly be described as intuitive action without concern for results, and entails discarding distinctions between what is desirable and undesirable, for instance.

Can insights from Daoism help expand the concept of care in narrative, decolonial approaches? I will present some reflections based on interviews of the SeMPER-Arctic researchers who did narrative fieldwork in Greenland, and will discuss the ambivalences around care as a way of not resisting and embracing insecurities; in other words, a way of going with the river flow.

Versions of care: Experimenting with interested methods

by Tone Druglitrø and Kristin Asdal, University of Oslo

With care studies now well established, this paper asks in line with the panel "care studies and after":– what is next with care? What could a possible care studies ‘and after’ look like? By working through fieldwork and a concrete empirical case of immunology research, our analysis teases out three versions of care – ‘procedural care’, ‘skilled care’ and ‘dispassionate care’. All versions are tied to the formalized arrangements of which science is part and demonstrates how ‘the formalized’ is involved in care-work. Our proposition for implies three "extensions" to care: (1) Towards more sites to be included as sites of care; (2) Towards new versions of care; and (3) Towards other empirical materials by which care can be seen to happen. A care studies and after also implies a move towards ‘interested methods’; that is, to continue to develop care studies as an approach that is aware of how our research methods are invested with interests, but in ways that are  pragmatic in terms of what care is and where and by which means it can be performed.

Agnotology and epistemic power-sharing: the case of coercive care

by Lena Eriksson, Institutionen för Filosofi, Lingvistik och Vetenskapsteori, Göteborgs Universitet

Scholars from several disciplines have called for careful and symmetrical tending not only to practices and institutional arrangements of knowing, but of not knowing (Proctor & Schiebinger 2008, McGoey 2007;2012). Here, I draw on agnotology and the sociology of ignorance to analyse decision-making practices regarding coercive psychiatric care.
 
When changes were proposed in the 1980’s that affected the professional jurisdiction regarding coercive care - subjecting medical decisions to judicial scrutiny in a court setting - reactions from the medical community were strong. The chairman of the parliamentary committee responsible for the proposal described how he was met by “a thousand psychiatrists booing” when presenting the suggestions to a Swedish psychiatry congress. The notion that judgments regarding the need for coercive care measures were not purely a medical affair was regarded by the medical profession as deeply subversive.

Fast forward to today, where several studies have shown that mental health courts rule according to the doctor’s recommendation in nearly 100 per cent of cases. Following McGoey’s (2012) view of ignorance as providing necessary infrastructure for institutions or practices, I discuss how court proceedings regarding coercive care are set up. The process is shaped by a division of labour between on the one hand medical experts and on the other judicial self-professed non-experts loath to query medical assessments, yet owning the mandate to decide. I propose that the court proceeding is its own answer; justice is served not because of how it is practiced but because a practice is in place.

Dental care and caring for oral health

by Louise Folker Christensen and Astrid Pernille Jespersen, Copenhagen Centre for Health Research in the Humanities (CoRe), University of Copenhagen

Dental care is an everyday mundane matter, valued for its aesthetic properties, health benefits, and feelings of well-being. However, when welfare services and healthcare professionals take over the daily care of the teeth it raises complex and ethical prioritization questions. Questions that contain both intimate, health-related, professional, systemic, and political dimensions. In our presentation, we will discuss the ‘messy’ practices, where welfare systems and standardized services go hand in hand with intimate bodily care work when older vulnerable people’s daily, preventive, and curative dental care is taken over by the Danish welfare system. Our point of departure is an ongoing research and co-creation project, Lifelong Oral Health, which we are involved in together with researchers from odontology and two Danish municipalities. The aim of the project is to improve oral health among older people in Danish eldercare. Through ethnographic fieldwork and co-creation activities at different kinds of care units (home care and nursing homes), we experience that prioritization of dental care constantly runs into complex dilemmas where resources (e.g., time and economy), values of good care, different forms of knowledge and policy processes intersect. Moreover, our case raises difficult ethical discussions about the complex situated entanglement between duty of care and neglect of care when e.g., the older person refuses or opposes dental care. And furthermore, we wish to discuss the methodological challenges of the co-creation ambition of the project when it constantly faces priority issues regarding distribution of responsibility between different professional groups and between municipal sections.

Infrastructures of Care for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

by Jenny Frogner, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

This paper explores infrastructures of care in the everyday lives of adults with Intellectual Disabilities (ID). While it is well known that parents of children with ID provide extensive support to their children, less is known about the involvement of parents when persons with ID reach adulthood in the Norwegian context. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among adults with ID in Norway, I analyse relationships between parents and adults with ID, and the contributions of parents in the lives of the persons with ID. This paper takes inspiration from dimensions of infrastructure defined by Star and Ruhleder (1996) and from conceptions of people’s activities as infrastructure, notably Simone (2004). The paper argues that the activities of parents are crucial in infrastructures of care for adults with ID, especially when it comes to enactment of agency for the persons with ID.

Through empirical examples I show how parents do articulation work, maintenance, and repair work on a system of care larger than themselves, that is on the care infrastructure of the welfare state. The care work engaged in by parents, which often remains invisible (Star 1999), involves tinkering with different arrangements between persons and material objects (Winance 2010). In cases of infrastructural failure, moreover, parents are highly involved in the rebuilding of new infrastructure, sometimes also serving as alternate infrastructure (Alam and Houston 2020).

Coffee machines, painkillers and tinnitus: experiments in sensory ethnography 

by Marie Gorm Aabo, Centre for Health Research in the Humanities (CoRe), University of Copenhagen

Inspired by Sound Studies and art-based research, I experiment with methods particularly useful for understanding a multiple sensory phenomenon like tinnitus. I ask: How can methods be designed to embed and capture sensory experiences in qualitative studies? Tinnitus is on the rise, and the condition challenges the sense of hearing and how the affected person perceives the everyday sound environment. Tinnitus is present both in the absence and in the presence of other sounds. The sensory system is part of our navigation and adaptation to the world. I use the concept of “attunement” to emphasise how sensory impression is constantly shaped and reshaped in the present moment - depending on all the other entities that are present. In examining hearing impairment from this perspective, I insist that hearing impairment as a phenomenon must be studied in practice and in the sociomaterial context in which it occurs. I work with a range of informants who experience tinnitus to varying degrees. Because of the informants' sensory experiences, I consider them experts with particular auditory knowledge. The informants engage in a process of co-creation with me as the researcher. Here I am inspired by design anthropological methods like design probes, methods from Sound Studies like listening diaries, and a method I call "tinnitus walk alongs". The presentation will explore the potentials of experimental sensory methods in ethnological methodological, analytical, and dissemination work, which will develop the ethnographic everyday life analysis and dissemination strategy.) 

Care in medical product development: Doctors as carers, consultants, entrepreneurs

by Harun Kaygan, University of Southern Denmark and Pinar Kaygan, Art Academy of Latvia

The paper is based on empirical data from 29 interviews across 16 businesses based in Turkey, including manufacturing SMEs, technology start-ups and design consultancies, for the design and development of around 25 medical products, most of which are aimed at export substitution for Turkish and surrounding markets, to be used in surgeries, laboratories and rehabilitation. The analysis mapped out relationships between industrial designers, engineers and health professionals, namely doctors, nurses and physiotherapists, within the context of medical product development, with special emphasis on the ways in which the actors and the processes involved distant references to as well as hands-on engagement with human bodies, those of both patients and health professionals.

Approaching "care" broadly, our investigation reveals diverse forms in which care is manifest in the tension between the logic of care and the logic of choice, the everyday and the standardized, and under the sign of biomedical and entrepreneurial discourses. Design processes involve projections about future care situations and care requirements formulated as user experience, negotiated and standardized in abstract terms in the multidisciplinary project, as well as concrete care situations in the form of usability trials. Care, and the underlying attentiveness and skills, are found in the work of the physiotherapist in the clinic; so can one indicate the specific forms of care involved in their work in consulting designers and engineers in product development, or in their entrepreneurial ventures, albeit in tension with objectifications of patients' and medical professionals' bodies in product development where they are considered as diagrammatic representations and anatomic geometries of interactions, and as value propositions in the operations of capitalization.

Datafied journeys towards care: companioning with menstruating bodies

by Alev Kuruoglu, Julia Wummel, Dorthe Brogård Kristensen, University of Southern Denmark

The menstruating body, while still concealed and stigmatized, is also increasingly in the spotlight through debates such as paid menstrual leave and fertility technologies. On this backdrop, we investigate how menstrual trackings practice can contribute to a transformative process of bodily revelation. We draw on in-depth interviews and netnographic fieldwork conducted with practitioners of a sympto-thermal method (STM) who digitally track bodily symptoms such as temperature and cervical mucus to determine their fertile days. The users become entangled into a socio-technical arrangement, consisting of (1) an app with an algorithm for documentation and cycle analysis, (2) an online community, (3) book knowledge, (4) bodily sensations, and (5) a thermometer, which facilitates three intertwined abilities: to read, to deliberate, and to connect. Embedded in an online epistemic community, this form of STM then instigates a journey of bodily knowledge and a ‘companioning with’ one’s own body as well as the bodies of others. Care and a distribution of response-ability arises mainly from the tinkering with and making sense of each other’s visualisations of bodily data. This community support in combination with the tracking technology enables people to safely explore their fertility cycles and meanings of their bodily symptoms, thereby creating intimate knowledge and a sense of authority about one’s body, cycle and fertility.

Caring in crisis: Tinkering with good consumption in a municipal program

by Maksim Novokreshchenov, University of Amsterdam

Numerous studies in the field of energy consumption assume that the transition to more sustainable energy use is complicated by self-reproducing and taken-for-granted social practices governing everyday life. Problematizing this image of practice with help of material semiotics, I argue instead that complexity lies in tensions between heterogeneous goods emerging in mundane practices related to energy, sustainability being only one example of such goods. The current situation of ‘energy crisis’ caused by the shortages of Russian gas on the European market helps me to demonstrate how even during an active public questioning and reconfiguration of human-energy relations these tensions can complicate the process of change. They cannot be resolved in a one-time decision but require tinkering with care. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted while serving as a volunteer in a Dutch municipal program that encourages house insulation and reduction of energy consumption, I demonstrate how these tensions emerge and are balanced out in program participants’ practices of care. I’m also focusing on how the program’s practitioners are balancing between caring for these heterogeneous goods and moralizing subjectivation which similar programs were criticized for. In doing so, I’m demonstrating the relevance of the concept of care and ethnography of caring practices for research on energy consumption. I also reflect on the conceptual challenges appearing when care studies face environmental issues: how to ethnographically study caring for a local environment when target subjects of such practices may lay at a long distance and temporal horizon?

Nesting Care with Climate Governance: A Empirical Inquiry into Embodied Deliberation in Citizens' Assemblies for Climate in Europe

by Maria Prieto, California Institute of Integral Studies

This paper addresses STS-oriented comparative empirical research on the intersections between urban-centred embodied social and climate justice activism and climate governance in urban Europe in the face of bewildering climate futures. The presentation focuses on tapping into the embodied-experiential dimensions that shaped the participatory processes of both the organization of the first citizens’ assemblies for climate in United Kingdom, France, and Spain between 2018 and 2023, and the articulation of the citizens' proposals. The paper contributes to the fields of STS and urban governance studies with evidence-based data from embodied inquiries into social and climate justice, urban-centred ethnography, and depth relational interviews using literature from somatic arts and somatic psychology studies. The study has the aim to reclaim the possibility of citizens’ in-person participatory and deliberative forms of engagement in climate governance, rather than only online, as many opportunities of testing and implementing democratic innovations through care, embodied empathy and intercorporeality (affects, nonverbal communication, pre-reflective mutual understanding, etc.) could have been missed and possibly hindered the democratic quality of the facilitation process. In brief, this paper is intended to outline new forms of citizens’ engagement by disclosing key implicit and explicit resilient embodied-relational care dynamics within the recent social and climate justice initiatives, practices and communities implicated in pursuing sustainable development goals. It aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the participatory framework of climate citizens’ assemblies, by disentangling the prefigurative, performative and institutional processes that eventually formed the mentioned climate citizens’ assemblies.

Care for algorithmic futures

by Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki

This paper revisits findings concerning structures of feeling in contemporary algorithmic culture by taking advantage of Annemarie Mol’s conceptual pair: the logic of choice and the logic of care. By attending to the joys, fears, and frustrations that current technologies trigger, we can identify unifying themes that explain how individuals position themselves and others in relation to algorithmic systems and futures. Applying Mol’s work to algorithmic expansions gives her concepts a new twist by redefining aspects of choice and care. In this context, care becomes evaluated favorably, as a positive social force, given that it is so obviously absent from the current economic arrangements around data and algorithms that sustain informational power asymmetries. Data companies with profit-oriented motives might have no interest in the logic of care: they might even argue against it, or try deliberatively breaking it. Instead, they exercise the logic of choice, treating algorithmic technologies as inescapable. Examining algorithmic inevitabilities in light of the two logics, we begin to see what the different feelings, including joys, fears, and frustrations, suggest in terms of collectives and the political-economic conditions set by dataveillance and the intensifying logic of datafication. Since they contain both generative and resistant aims, feelings serve as potential points of defiance that aid in rethinking the taken-for-granted state of affairs. Questioning the dominance of the logic of choice aids in breaking ground for thinking differently about the defining features of prevailing technological arrangements.

nursing the #kelp is also a task of caring #kelptheearth

by Marie Stilling, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation, and Culture, University in Oslo

The title of this paper captures a facebook post from the Norwegian seaweed cultivating company, Seaweed Solutions. The post featured a photograph portraying a man standing what appears to be a laboratory. He leans forward, his gaze fixated at a glass vial in his hands, which he holds with the same tenderness as one would hold an infant child. The setting of the photograph is Seaweed Solutions’ “nursery” – the laboratory, where the company hatch seedlings for the burgeoning Norwegian kelp cultivation industry. The post points to the care work involved in introducing new beings to the economy, but the hashtag #kelptheearth indicates that care for seaweeds is enmeshed with a care for less tangible objects. The emerging Norwegian seaweed cultivation industry is underpinned with ambitions of creating an environmentally good economy. Can seaweed cultivation be analysed as a way of caring for economy and environment? Can care studies be stretched to encompass the care for such abstract and intangible objects as environment and economy? And if yes, how can these different kinds of care objects and their mutual relation be grasped analytically?

This paper draws on both care studies and Sara Ahmed’s cultural theory of affect to analyse how caring for cultivated seaweeds creates orientations towards projects of creating a normatively good economy. Empirically, the paper builds on ethnographic photographs of seaweed seeding on a Norwegian farm, where nursing seaweeds and attending to economy coalesce.) 

Veterinary care and the value-scapes of animal husbandry

by Else Vogel, University of Amsterdam

Veterinary care is at the heart of the production, treatment and end of farm animal life. What comes to be ‘good’ care on the farm, however, is by no means up to the discretion of the individual vet or farmer. Through laws, guidelines, checklists, risk analyses and benchmarks, public and private governance schemes stipulate and follow nearly everything that is done with animals. Moreover, economic values such as the worth of animal products and the cost of shelter, food, medicine and veterinary services deeply inform breeding and management practices. In this paper, I sketch how policy domains with divergent and often clashing registers of valuing—economy, food safety, animal welfare, public health, sustainability—come together in animal husbandry. These domains not only shape what ‘the good’ or goods are that veterinary care fosters—i.e. what vets value and evaluate—but also configure how vets can do good, the roles they have on farms, for instance as practitioners, consultants or inspectors. The plurality of concerns and positions adds considerable complexity in farming’s ‘valuation constellations’ (Waibel, Peetz & Meier 2021). I offer the concept of ‘value-scapes’ to understand and compare how economic, legal and regulatory infrastructures shape the ways in which health and welfare are problematized and responded to on the farm. Tracing ‘value-scapes’, I argue, reveals how different concerns are translated and enacted in assessments and while feeding, housing, and treating animals. More broadly, the concept draws attention to how valuation devices and care practices circulate and shape each other.

“being a tool” or “heart for heart” : reciprocal emotion management in a nursing home in China

by Yuan Yan, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) in University of Amsterdam

In the context of market-oriented elderly care in China, the emotional labour of caregivers is directly related to the work experience of caregivers and the quality of care received by caregivers. This article examines whether it is possible to build authentic emotional connections between caregivers and the elderly to achieve emotional care, and how they do so. Previous studies have examined that market-oriented care institutions pursuing profit and efficiency hinder the caregivers from providing emotional care for the elderly from the organizational level, ignoring the interactive emotional experience between the caregiver and the elderly. Based on research at a nursing home in China, this article explores how different types of power relations between caregivers and the elderly affect the establishment of authentic emotional care. By introducing a relational perspective through the notion of reciprocity emotional management, This article shows that the "customer-server" relationship defined by the market has strengthened the unequal power between caregivers and the elderly, thus caregivers who give one-way emotional care tend to refuse to provide emotional care due to a lack of emotional feedback. They define themselves as “being a tool” in this care relationship. However, the care relationship between caregivers and people with dementia goes beyond the “customer-service” relationship, allowing the two-way interactive "heart for heart" emotional reciprocity management to happen.) 

Roundtable participants

Wakana Suzuki is an assistant professor at Osaka University in Japan. She has a PhD in Anthropology with a specialization in Science, Technology and Culture from Osaka University. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Anthropology of Health, Care and the Body at the University of Amsterdam. Based on laboratory studies and care studies in STS, her previous ethnographic research on iPS Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine in Japan explored how scientists and technicians care for and use cells and animals to make knowledge and to develop new medical technologies. Her work has also analyzed how global standards of laboratory animal regulations conflict with the Japanese way of understanding and caring of animals. She is currently working on fermentation practices (making bread, Miso or shoyu), comparing Japan and the Netherlands.   

Tone Druglitrø is a researcher at the TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo. She has over several years been concerned with experimenting with care as an approach and tool for studying values in science and policy with a specific focus on animal research. Based upon a combination of archive studies, laboratory ethnographies, and document-oriented studies, her work has traced the historical development of “skilled care” as an expertise in science, and analyzed the convergence of biological standardization, conservation and technical care in public health. She has also published on “procedural care” in licensing systems. She is currently exploring versions of care in cod immunology together with Kristin Asdal (TIK). 

Else Vogel (chair) is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam whose research focuses on values in (human and animal) health care practices. She combines the empirical study of care practices with philosophical reflections on valuation, care and biopolitics. Her current ethnographic research explores how farm animal care involves negotiation between various notions of ‘the good’ – animal welfare, financial interests, public health and sustainability.

Ada Arendt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, where she is currently co-heading the interdisciplinary research group KLIMER: climate, environment and energy, and working on her second monograph The Microhistory of Care. Before coming to Oslo in 2022, she was a Swiss Excellence Grant Fellow at the Institute of History, University of Bern, and an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. Her research is focused on early modern environmental history. Arendt earned her PhD (Hons) in Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw with a dissertation on early modern almanac annotations, published in 2019 as an award-winning book Archeologia zatroskania. Staropolskie kalendarze w działaniu [Archaeology of Care. Early Modern Almanacs in Action]