Abstract
In this article I trace mediated effects that surface with attentions to seniors and their bodies in care. This includes new technologies for visualizing and monitoring the body. I also consider the implications of mediated body-technology attentions for care surveillance. Surveillance offers valuable analytical purchase in the study of care. Yet, care attentions are not always straightforward. These can become obstructed, negotiated and transformed with technologies for care. There are multiple empirical examples of how technically mediated attentions produce ambiguous or multivalent effects, both in the literature and my own ethnographic work. These multivalent effects, I argue, displace the notion of surveillance in care. To strengthen my argument, I draw on STS-inspired anthropological studies of care. Lastly I proffer the term “care-valence” as a heuristic compliment to the notion of care surveillance. This term, I proffer, benefits the analysis of how care attentions effect somatechnic relations.
Highlights
The gerontological literature indicates that many seniors prefer to live at home in familiar surroundings to avoid long-term institutionalized senior care
The somatechnic effects that emerge with care attentions are multivalent in their implications
Once we establish that the reality of a given entity such as a body or technology can become multiple in different practices, I maintain that all forms of care attention—visual or otherwise—relate to the doing of ontological difference which in turn challenges notions like perspective and surveillance
Summary
The gerontological literature indicates that many seniors prefer to live at home in familiar surroundings to avoid long-term institutionalized senior care. I trace several ethnographic vignettes that concern how attentions in senior home care relate to the multivalent mediations of aging bodies with technology. This ethnographic passage offers one example of how attentions to bodies with technology in senior home care can mediate multiple effects.
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