Health, Interrupted: Infrastructures and Tinkering in Telecare

Abstract

Telecare involves using telecommunications and virtual technology to remotely monitor patients and/or deliver health services outside of traditional healthcare facilities. These digital solutions are being established in many countries and in many forms, which requires a stable, well-organized infrastructure. But infrastructures encompass and affect social practices, and may become modified by human actors. Additionally, the practice of healthcare often involves tinkering with people and technical aids to ensure that they function optimally, and these arrangements may not always comply with the infrastructures designed to support them.
Following the conference theme, this panel invites contributions that explore infrastructures and tinkering related to telecare solutions. The digitalization of healthcare fundamentally contains ideas about the innovative nature of technology; i.e., that it can regenerate traditional forms of care. However, the implementation of telecare solutions is often based on business cases, inscribing it in an economic rationality that may interrupt the provision of care.
In this panel, we explore the different modes of engagement involved in telecare, focusing on two central questions: How do telecare solutions innovate and regenerate healthcare services, and how are infrastructures and human/nonhuman actors tinkered with in order to prevent interruptions in care? Relevant sub-questions include:
• How do telecare infrastructures interrupt embedded healthcare practices, professional and/or intersectoral collaborations, etc.?
• How are telecare solutions enacted in different locations/fields of practice, and what outcomes do they produce for the human/nonhuman actors involved?
• How does an STS perspective help to illuminate telecare’s entanglement with professional knowledge/practices, relational forms of care, and ethical negotiations?

Discussant

• Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Individual Presentations

• The Work of Re-Contextualising Patient Information: Clinical Decision-Making in the Era of Patient Reported Outcomes - Rikke Torenholt, Copenhagen University; Henriette Langstrup, University of Copenhagen

• Disrupting Psychiatry: Framing New Forms of Caring - Stine Rath Hansen, PhD student at DPU, Aarhus University, Denmark

• Telecare Infrastructures, Interruption and Different Ideas of Good - Niels Christian Nickelsen, Aarhus University, School of Education

• Recovery on Instagram: How Medical and Embodied Knowledges Interact in Networked Discourses about Orthorexia Nervosa - Amy A. Ross Arguedas, Northwestern University

Session Organizer

• Niels Christian Nickelsen, Aarhus University, School of Education