We welcome submissions to ‘Care and technologies in a digitalised society [s3]’, an open session at the 31 st Nordic Sociological Association Conference. The NSA Conference will take place between August 14-16, 2024 in Norrköping, Sweden (Linköping University, Campus Norrköping). The theme of the conference is Sociology in a Digital World.
Care and technologies in a digitalised society [s3]
Session chairs:
- Barbara Fersch, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
- Marjo Kolehmainen, University of Turku, Finland
- Doris Lydahl, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Digital technologies play an infrastructural role in our everyday lives, also in providing care. This open session invites sociologically informed papers interrogating how digital technologies, from specific health technologies to popular platforms and applications, reconfigure care. Digitalization has for decades been touted as one major solution to welfare state challenges and digital technologies are increasingly used within the welfare sector, changing the ways we understand ‘good care’. They further transform the relations between caretakers and care providers. Yet they also challenge the categories of caring and cared- for – for instance, from the perspective of more-than-human care, different technologies have capacities to care. Further, technologies themselves might require human care. We are thus interested in asking what the digital enables, and what new ways of thinking about care are made possible. While digital elements can improve care services for some groups within society, they can also lead to new forms of exclusion for others; however, the patterns and underlying dynamics of these forms of digital exclusion in the field of care remain underexplored so far. This session advances an approach where care is understood broadly, discussing different forms of informal and formal care from self-care to peer support and from care work to organizational perspectives.
The potential themes include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- What kind of new questions, data and methods the emergence of digital technologies in formal and/or informal care raises?
- What kind of care networks do digital societies foster? How do we best study them?
- How does the use of digital technologies in care advance sustainability, more just societies and more inclusive care services and practices?
- How do digital technologies reproduce already existing social injustices and what kind of new digital divides are produced?
- What role do intersecting categories like age, educational background, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or urban-rural dimensions play in the patterns of digital exclusion?
- What kind of risks and vulnerabilities are intertwined in the processes where digital technologies take part in caring practices?
Submit your abstract here: The 31st Nordic Sociological Association Conference (liu.se)
More info about the conference: 31st Nordic Sociological Association Conference – Linköping University (liu.se)