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<div class="csl-entry">Vogel, L., Ramirez Nethersole, R., & Vallès-Peris, N. (2024, September 17). <i>Care robots as breaching artifacts: An analysis of care infrastructures in elderly nursing homes</i> [Presentation]. 7th Innovation in Information Infrastructures (III) Workshop, Barcelona, Spain. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12708/204966</div>
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dc.identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12708/204966
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dc.description.abstract
The question of ‘what happens when we introduce new artefacts into care assemblages’ reflects much of the underlying discussion surrounding social robotics in elderly nursing homes. The implementation of robot pilot programs in nursing homes has sparked a growing and even anxious debate regarding the potential risks and disruptive impacts of robots for both caregivers
and older adults. In this paper, drawing on past ethnographic research, we delve into the role of infrastructural reassemblages, examining emerging controversies and ultimately addressing robots as breaching artefacts that make visible assemblages of digital and care infrastructures. The implementation of robot technology for older adults raises relevant questions concerning infrastructure and the practice of care. Moreover, there is a striking discrepancy between what we expect from robots and the technical practices of programming, building, and operating such technology (Lipp, 2022). Therefore, following Monteiro et al. (2012: 579), we adhere to the idea that complex organisational technologies, such as social robots, “need to be taken
apart, broken down, adapted and reconfigured before they can become useful for an organisation”. Addressing the problem of embeddedness, when not taking into account “the entanglement of one technology with other apparently unrelated ones” (Monteiro et al. 2012: 575), we take a step further and aim at analysing the robots as breaching with material and social configuration in care infrastructures. Exploring pilot testing as breaching experiments (Garfinkel, 1967) and robots as breaching artefacts, in this paper, we argue that the introduction of robots in care homes breaches physical and organisational structures thus making visible the network of caring infrastructures that
configure daily care in nursing home settings. Our current working hypothesis is that the introduction of a non-stabilized technology into a care assemblage gives way to negotiations which visibilize existing material, symbolic and semiotic relations of care, while reframing those.
With research experience on both social robot pilot testing and participatory design for aged care, we offer a theoretical contribution on the controversies that emerge with these moments of “breachment” from both the elderly and caregiver perspective. Concretely, we address careworker and older adults controversies of reassembling experimental knowledge, physical
contact, routines, skills and control when introducing new care technologies as robotic systems. By focusing on moments of ‘breachment’, we adhere to the notion that care robotics could be analysed as a gateway to render negotiations and conditions of entanglement among digital infrastructures and assemblages of care. Challenging the promissory and sometimes gloomy
discourse that care robots are disruptive technology, we offer an alternative perspective on how to approach robots from their breaching potential to understand how care is infrastructured.
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dc.language.iso
en
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dc.subject
care technology
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dc.subject
robots
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dc.subject
breaching experiment
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dc.subject
aged care
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dc.subject
sociomaterial practices
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dc.title
Care robots as breaching artifacts: An analysis of care infrastructures in elderly nursing homes
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dc.type
Presentation
en
dc.type
Vortrag
de
dc.contributor.affiliation
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
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dc.contributor.affiliation
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain
