Background Gerontechnologies are increasingly used in the care for older people. Many studies on their acceptability and ethical implications are conducted, but mainly from the perspective of principlism. This narrows our ethical gaze on the implications the use of these technologies have. Research question How do participants speak about the impact that gerontechnologies have on the different phases of care, and care as a process? What are the moral implications from an ethic of care perspective? (...) Research design Secondary analysis of semi-structure interviews, whose segments on specific technologies were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. Participants and research context Sixty-seven Swiss stakeholders involved in the use of gerontechnologies, including professional caregivers, informal caregivers, and older persons themselves. Ethical considerations The research study was evaluated by the Ethics Commission of Northwest and Central Switzerland (EKNZ). All participants received an information document before the interview date detailing the purpose, procedure, and anonymization measures. After explaining the study during the agreed upon interview time and upon receiving their written informed consent, the interview process began. Findings/results Four themes are identified: Identifying care needs, Taking responsibility, Hands-on work, Responding to care. As part of these themes, many codes highlighting the ambivalent impact of gerontechnologies are created, ranging from ‘Expanded capacity for…identifying care needs’ to ‘Create new & (un)necessary…hands-on work’. The moral implications of these results from the care ethics perspective are discussed, through the ethical elements of: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. Conclusions The moral implications of gerontechnologies on care phases from the care ethics perspective open up several questions on whether they actually help give care a central role in social life and provide more competent care. (shrink)

Based upon research into small community-based organisations, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can be interpreted as a technology that emerges from complex environments of support, teaching, and community development. While the ICTs investigated are commonplace and relatively simple systems (personal computers, Internet), they are part of complex and extended systems of action, knowledge, information, and support that reach into local communities. This basket of processes and skills, oriented around social justice principles, can be conceived of as ‘technologies of (...) care’, strongly influenced by the values and work activity primarily concerned with supporting people in need. Furthermore, prior research has tended to take a dystopic view about the use of technology by women, who are the major workforce in such environments, but a more nuanced approach is taken her, demonstrating that while workers are competent with ICTs, they is only one element in a process which relies upon communicative and interpretive independence. This understanding of the place of ICTs in human services work has important implications for those implementing or designing ICTs, though clarifying workers’ tacit understandings is a research challenge. Based on more recent research, suggestions are also made about the limitations of the study and the need to take into account other ways of articulating tacit, practical knowledge about ICT relationships through methods such as CO-MAP. (shrink)

Purpose – Contemporary technology has been implicated in the rise of perfectionism, a personality trait that is associated with depression, suicide and other ills. is paper explores how technology can be developed to promote an alternative to perfectionism, which is a self- constructionist ethic. Design/methodology/approach – is paper takes the form of a philosophical discussion. A conceptual framework is developed by connecting the literature on perfectionism and personal meaning with discussions in information ethics on the self, the ontic trust and (...) technologies of the self. To illustrate these themes, the example of selfies and self-portraits is discussed. Findings – e self today must be understood as both individualistic and relational, i.e., hybrid; the trouble is balance. To realize balance, the self should be recognized as part of the ontic trust to which all information organisms and objects belong. us technologically-mediated self-care takes on a deeper urgency. e selfie is one example of a technology for self-care that has gone astray (i.e., lost some of its care-conducive aspects), but this can be remedied if selfie-making technology incorporates relevant aspects of self-portraiture. is example provides a path for developing self- constructionist and meaningful technologies more generally. Practical implications – Technology development should proceed with self-care and meaning in mind. e comparison of selfies and self-portraits, situated historically and theoretically, provides some guidance in this regard. Some specific avenues for development are presented. Originality/value – e question of the self has not been much discussed in information ethics. is paper links the self to the ontic trust: the self can be fruitfully understood as an agent within the ontic trust to which we all belong. (shrink)

Self-care apps are booming. Early iterations of this technology focused on tracking health and fitness routines, but recently some developers have turned their attention to the cultivation of character, basing their conceptual resources on the Hellenistic tradition (Stoic Meditations™, Stoa™, Stoic Mental Health Tracker™). Those familiar with the final writings of Michel Foucault will notice an intriguing coincidence between the development of these products and his claims that the Hellenistic tradition of self-cultivation has much to offer contemporary life. In (...) this article, I explore Foucault’s cryptic remarks on this topic, and argue that today’s self-care developers can improve future products by paying attention to the Hellenistic exercises of self-cultivation he identifies as especially important. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Assistive care technologies, developed to replace, support, or extend human capabilities and to address the surging demands of care, have been gaining prominence recently. The current trend summons a posthuman approach through decentering the privileged role of humans in several spaces of caregiving, such as hospitals and eldercare homes. The existence of these cutting-edge assistive technologies, exciting as they are, hints at a possible future when the distinction between humans and technology will be blurred, thus transforming (...) care relations. However, these technological advances carry equal promises and dangers. While care robots may reduce the burden of caregiving, they also threaten to minimize human contact with vulnerable populations. This critical assessment reviews technological advances in care and close-reads several single-panel cartoons to theorize the impact of technologies on caring relations. The article also examines the neoliberal underpinnings of such technologies and the moral dangers of their unreflective use. (shrink)

Agricultural technologies are non-neutral and ethical challenges are posed by these technologies themselves. The technologies we use or endorse are embedded with values and norms and reflect the shape of our moral character. They can literally make us better or worse consumers and/or people. Looking back, when the world’s developed nations welcomed and steadily embraced industrialization as the dominant paradigm for agriculture a half century or so ago, they inadvertently championed a philosophy of technology that promotes an (...) insular human-centricism, despite its laudable intent to ensure food security and advance human flourishing. The dominant philosophy of technology has also seeded particular ethical consequences that plague the well-being of human beings, the planet, and farmed animals. After revisiting some fundamental questions regarding the complex ways in which technology as agent shapes our lives and choices and relegates food and farmed constituents into technological artifacts or commodities, I argue that we should accord an environmental virtue ethic of care—understood as caretaking—a central place in developing a more conscientious philosophy of technology that aims at sustainability, fairness, and humaneness in animal agriculture. While technology shapes society, it also is socially shaped and an environmental virtue ethic of care (EVEC) as an alternative design philosophy has the tools to help us take a much overdue inventory of ourselves and our relationships with the nonhuman world. It can help us to expose the ways in which technology hinders critical reflection of its capacity to alter communities and values, to come to terms with why we may be, in general, disengaged from critical ethical analysis of contemporary agriculture and to consider the moral shape and trajectory and the sustainability of our food production systems going into the future. I end by outlining particular virtues associated with the ethic of care discussed here and consider some likely implications for consumers and industry technocrats as they relate to farming animals. (shrink)

The regulation of innovation reflects a specific imaginary of the role of governance that makes it external to the field it governs. It is argued that this decision and rule-based view of regulation is insufficient to deal with the inescapable uncertainties that are produced by innovation. In particular, relying on risk-based knowledge as the basis of regulation fails to deal sufficiently both with the problem that innovation ensures the future will not resemble the past, and with the problem that the (...) social priorities that underlie innovation often remain unquestioned. Recently, rights-based frameworks have been defended as principle-based approaches to innovation governance that address the gaps which trouble an understanding of regulation as guided by risk-based decision procedures. An alternative view of governance is defended, based on a concept of care drawn from feminist ethics and other traditions. Care aims, not at justifying punctual decisions, but at transforming institutions and practices, with the goal of creating specific institutional ‘virtues’, and requires the broad and deep participation of publics in shaping innovation. In this way, governance is made internal to innovation. (shrink)

This article expands Michel Foucault’s schema of the human ‘technologies’—those of production, signification, power and technologies of the self —to posit the existence of a fifth technological modality described here as technologies of the other. This refers to techniques and practices that facilitate the autonomy, not of the self, but of another person or persons. The specificity of these techniques of care, I argue, is obscured in Foucault’s work in so far as they are subsumed as (...) a ‘position’ within the technologies of the self, rather than afforded the status of a separate mode of technological practice in their own right. This not only misrecognizes their qualitative difference—the special kind of human ‘making’ they entail—but also allows for the dubious claim of an ‘ontological primacy’ of self-care when this is actually preceded by, and dependent upon, prior other-care. As one potential candidate or fragment of this alternative technological lineage, the paper revisits the writings on the psychoanalytic technique of empathy elaborated in the British Independent tradition of Donald Winnicott. It explores how these empathetic techniques engage in an ethics of ‘other-fashioning’—a necessary prelude to the emergence of capacities of autonomous ‘self-fashioning’—and suggests that such empathy can neither be encapsulated fully under the rubric of technologies of the self, nor read as isomorphic with the technologies of power. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the social consequences of biotechnological control of population for values and ethics of care within the family household in rural north India. Based on long-term ethnographic research, it illustrates the manner in which social practices intermingle with reproductive choices and new reproductive technologies, leading to a systematic elimination of female foetuses, and thus, imbalanced sex ratios. This technological fashioning of populations, the paper argues, has far-reaching consequences for the institutions of family, marriage and kinship (...) in north India particularly in relation to care circulation within the family-household leading to a shifting local ethics of care. (shrink)

Background The worldwide increase in older persons demands technological solutions to combat the shortage of caregiving and to enable aging in place. Smart home health technologies (SHHTs) are promoted and implemented as a possible solution from an economic and practical perspective. However, ethical considerations are equally important and need to be investigated. Methods We conducted a systematic review according to the PRISMA guidelines to investigate if and how ethical questions are discussed in the field of SHHTs in caregiving for (...) older persons. Results 156 peer-reviewed articles published in English, German and French were retrieved and analyzed across 10 electronic databases. Using narrative analysis, 7 ethical categories were mapped: privacy, autonomy, responsibility, human vs. artificial interactions, trust, ageism and stigma, and other concerns. Conclusion The findings of our systematic review show the (lack of) ethical consideration when it comes to the development and implementation of SHHTs for older persons. Our analysis is useful to promote careful ethical consideration when carrying out technology development, research and deployment to care for older persons. Registration We registered our systematic review in the PROSPERO network under CRD42021248543. (shrink)

Safe-by-Design is an approach to engineering that aims to integrate the value of safety in the design and development of new technologies. It does so by integrating knowledge of potential dangers in the design process and developing methods to design undesirable effects out of the innovation. Recent discussions have highlighted several challenges in conceptualizing safety and integrating the value into the design process. Therefore, some have argued to design for the _responsibility_ for safety, instead of for safety itself. However, (...) this idea has not been developed further. In this article, we develop an approach to Safe-by-Design, grounded in care ethics, which builds on the idea of designing for responsibility and can deal with the complexity that is inherent to the conceptualization of safety. We describe five ways in which care ethics contributes to the conceptualization of Safe-by-Design: (1) It suggests the development of ‘circles of care’ in which stakeholders share the responsibility for safety; (2) it recognizes the importance of considering safety as something that is situated in the surroundings of a technology, instead of as a property of the technology itself; (3) it acknowledges that achieving safety is labour that requires an ongoing commitment; (4) it emphasizes that the way in which we relate to technology impacts its safety; and (5) it recognizes the role of emotions in assessing safety. All these elements combined lead to a broader understanding of safety and a philosophically more substantial and practically more appealing conceptualization of Safe-by-Design. (shrink)

The rapid development of assisted reproduction technologies for the treatment of infertility appears to empower women through expanding their individual choice, but it is also creating new forms of suffering for them and their collaborators, especially in the context of transnational third-party reproduction. This paper explores the possibility of framing the ethical discourse around third-party reproduction by bringing attention to concerns of altruistic empathy for women who collaborate in the reproductive process, in addition to those of individualistic choice. This (...) would entail moving beyond an ethic of liberty that is based on self-interest and the language of rights, to an alternative ethic of care that is based on self-restraint and the language of responsibilities. An ethic of care and responsibility would cultivate the empathetic self-reflection of the autonomous actor in relation to those others who are part of the enterprise of bringing a child into the world. (shrink)

The article brings to light the use of recommender systems as technologies of the self, complementing the observations in current literature regarding their employment as technologies of ‘soft’ power. User practices on the music recommendation website last.fm reveal that many users do not only utilize the website to receive guidance about music products but also to examine and transform an aspect of their self, i.e. their ‘music taste’. The capacity of assisting users in self-cultivation practices, however, is not (...) unique to last.fm but stem from certain properties shared by all recommendation systems. Furthermore, unlike other oft-studied digital/web technologies of the self which facilitate ‘self-publishing’ vis-à-vis virtual companions in social media, recommender algorithms themselves can act as ‘intimate experts’, accompanying users in their self-care practices. Thus, recommendation systems can facilitate both algorithmic control and creative self-transformation, which calls for a theorization of this new cultural medium as a space of tension. (shrink)

As part of current energy transitions in the Global North, households have begun adopting renewable energy technologies, such as heat pumps and solar power systems, in significant numbers. These changes give rise to the following question: how are technology and gender configured when new technologies enter everyday life? Based upon ethnographic fieldwork on interactions between households, technologies, and technicians and interviews with sales technicians, installers, and service mechanics, I demonstrate how both stable and fragile variants of renewable (...) energy technologies are enacted during prepurchase consultations and postpurchase installations, respectively. I employ science and technology studies scholarship, feminist ethics, and repair and maintenance studies—captured through the analytical lens of care—to analyze how technicians mobilize and tinker with gendered affection, knowledge, and action in households to effectuate adoption of renewable energy technologies. I clarify how, in this process, openings are created to configure both hegemonic and heterogeneous gender–technology relations. Finally, I advance discussion beyond gender issues by arguing that acknowledging the role of maintainability and the repair of user–technology relations in current energy transitions opens pathways not only for exploring gender in new and exciting ways in relation to technology but technician–user relationships as well. (shrink)

Continuing medico-technical progress has led toan increasing medicalisation of pregnancy andchildbirth. One of the most common technologiesin this context is ultrasound. Based on someidentified `pro-technology feminist theories',notably the postmodernist feminist discourse,the technology of ultrasound is analysedfocusing mainly on social and political ratherthan clinical issues. As empirical researchsuggests, ultrasound is welcomed by themajority of women. The analysis, however, showsthat attitudes and decisions of women areinfluenced by broader social aspects. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the visualtechnology of ultrasound, in addition to otherreproductive technology (...) in maternity care, islinked to the `personification' of the foetusand has therefore contributed to a new image ofthe foetus. The exploration of these issueschallenges some arguments of feministdiscourse. It draws attention to possibleadverse implications of the technology forwomen's reproductive freedom and indicates theimportance of the topic for politicaldiscussions. (shrink)

This paper examines the basis for the commonly expressed sentiment that librarians have been late to adopt emerging technologies for use in library and information science practice. Using insights from science and technology studies, this sentiment is shown to be inadequately empirically warranted. The trope of the technophobic librarian is examined for clues to the importance of gendered emotional labor in effective library work, under the rubric of “customer service.” These clues lead to an examination of embodiment in the (...) virtual world Second Life, and the emerging presence of librarians there. Using Second Life librarianship as a case study, this paper argues that embodiment is an important resource for library work, and that women’s technological labor is effaced through the trope of the technophobic librarian. Deconstructive analytical moves which collapse binary categories, yoked with methods from science and technology studies, are suggested for future fine-grained accounts of library technological practice. (shrink)

Many activities of doctors in the acute hospital sector do not improve patient outcome because they are inappropriate. Curtailing interventions that are unnecessary (because the patient is not bad enough) or are unsuccessful (because the condition is too advanced) could both save resources and improve care. Rational rationing depends on knowledge about the expected benefits of various technologies when used in different clinical circumstances.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eclecticism and the Technologies of Discernment in Pietist PedagogyKelly J. WhitmerWhile the Franckesche Stiftungen (the Francke Foundations) of Halle/Saale are perhaps best known today as the institutional centre of German Pietism, throughout much of the eighteenth century they were widely regarded as a pedagogically innovative Schulstadt (or city of schools). The founder of this Schulstadt, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), was many things to many people: Pietist, radical Lutheran, (...) theologian, pedagogue, professor of Greek and Oriental languages, preacher, member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and proponent of a Protestant mission. Like most participants in what was initially a grassroots movement oriented around the personality of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), a minister active in Frankfurt am Main around 1670 who sought to breathe new life into the Lutheran church,2 Francke rarely referred to himself as a Pietist. From his post at the University of Halle (founded in 1694), this Spenerian prote´gé set out to create a new "universal seminar" that would make the assimilation of many diverse points of view, identities, and competing strands of knowledge its [End Page 545] defining mandate. "My purpose," Francke wrote in a letter to a Pastor Ring from Grünebartau (October 29, 1712), "is to develop a universal institution, useful for bringing into a good and holy order all that is important for the Christianity of all orders of society and relates, in some way, to the healing power of the soul."3 His Schulstadt would "bring into order" a myriad of relationships around a single point and relied, quite deliberately I propose, on an eclectic methodology to do this.In recent years, the relationship of Francke's Schulstadt to the implementation of Brandenburg-Prussia's first compulsory schooling system and teacher training institutes has been better documented than in the past.4 Scholars of education have paid closer attention to the methodological innovations of Pietist pedagogy, and its points of convergence with the ideas of John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) have become subjects of mounting interest.5 Francke's significance for the history of education has been assessed mainly in terms of his ability to realize the pedagogically inclined reform projects of seventeenth-century figures, such as Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670).6 We know that the thousands of children who participated in the life of the Schulstadt very often left Halle to become actively involved as teachers and ministers throughout the German states. Several played pivotal roles in the development of the late eighteenth-century educational reform movement known as Philanthropismus and its associated practices and institutions.7 [End Page 546]Perhaps the most striking feature of Francke's Schulstadt was its curriculum, which featured innovative training regimens in applied mathematics for children from diverse social backgrounds.8 The scale and rigor of these programs were to be found nowhere else at the time and can be linked to the overtly pedagogical mandate of the Berlin Academy of Sciences (f. 1701). These regimens deliberately juxtaposed artisanal and learned knowledge and stressed the importance of the eye as a conciliatory medium.9 Despite having acquired largely anti-empiricist reputations over the years due to their lingering interest in alchemy and their roles in securing the banishment of the "rationalist" mathematician and philosopher, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), from their community in 1723, careful consideration of what Halle Pietists were teaching in their schools suggests a different view. These historical actors reconciled categories of knowledge production and transmission often framed as oppositional—despite what several scholars have recently shown to be their clear interconnectedness.10I argue here for the predominance of eclecticism in the Schulstadt, including a pronounced emphasis on the "middling" mathematical and mechanical sciences as tools of conciliation and self-improvement. I seek to illustrate how eclecticism was much more than a Philosophiebegriff that was well received by some Pietists, as Walter Sparn has argued, but that it is better understood as a set of conciliatory practices, traces of which resonate in Pietist lesson plans.11 Teachers in Francke's schools integrated experimental philosophy into an educational program that was introducing children to the exercises of... (shrink)

Agrawal's carefully constructed arguments create a framework for environmental policy analysis. One only wishes the message were in a language and form that would draw in policy and advocacy readers, not just scholars.

Für eine ethische Beurteilung des Einsatzes moderner Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien sowie autonomer Assistenzsysteme im Berufsfeld Pflege empfiehlt es sich zunächst, empirische Informationen über Wirkungen und Folgen dieser Technologien aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven einzuholen. Allerdings ist die Studienlage erweiterungsbedürftig. Auch wenn die Diskussion eher tentativ auf der Grundlage von vorsichtigen Annahmen geführt werden kann, so schälen sich dennoch in der internationalen pflegewissenschaftlichen Debatte sehr ambivalente Bewertungen heraus. Eine der Kontroversen betrifft die Frage, inwieweit und in welchem Maße Pflege als Beziehungsarbeit technisch substituiert (...) werden kann oder darf; inwieweit sich dadurch nicht nur Strukturen der Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit wandeln, sondern soziokulturelle Bedingungen von Hilfe, Unterstützung und Befähigung grundlegend verändern. Assistenztechnologien werden nicht nur das widersprüchliche Verhältnis von Sicherheit, Überwachung, Kontrolle und Entmündigung verschärfen. Unter dem Einfluss moderner Informationstechnologien wird sich auch der Status professionellen Wissens wandeln. Von erheblichem Gewicht ist schließlich, ob möglicherweise sozialanthropologische Grundannahmen wie beispielsweise die der leiblichen Responsivität und personalen Authentizität obsolet werden. Die ethische Beurteilung erfolgt aus verschiedenen Bewertungsperspektiven. Aus deontologischer Sicht hat sich die Akzeptanz neuer Technologien daran zu bemessen, inwieweit deren Wirkungen mit normativen Ansprüchen und Integritätsinteressen (Selbstbestimmung, Sicherheit) betroffener Personen vereinbar sind. Aus Sicht einer Ethics of Care wird es darum gehen, inwieweit durch den Einsatz von Assistenztechnologien nicht nur psychophysische Entlastungen (Pflegepersonal, Patient*innen, ältere Menschen), nicht nur bessere Informationsflüsse bewirkt werden können. Nicht weniger bedeutsam ist die Frage, ob soziale Netzwerke entwickelt, Möglichkeiten der Teilhabe verbessert und kreative Potenziale der Selbstorganisation und der Selbstwirksamkeit gefördert werden können. (shrink)

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extends further into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is necessary (...) to ask whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a constitutive connection between care and justice. (shrink)

In this analysis I apply a Foucauldian approach to ethics to examine the politically prescribed moral and ethical character required of carers of aged persons at home in Australia and the role of nurses in shaping these behaviours. The work that spousal carers provide, although often founded on love and/or obligation, has been formalized through a variety of policy initiatives and technologies that serve to construct the moral approach they must adopt. This shaping of conduct at the most personal (...) level takes place through the application of codes of behaviour policed largely by nurses. These codes redefine the mode of coexistence between an aged husband and wife and propose a new form of relationship that is derived from and supports policies of the deinstitutionalization of care services for elderly persons. In this way modern carer policy has drawn on knowledge and governance of the self to produce a morality of caring that is both authoritative and scientific. (shrink)

The Director-General of the WHO has suggested that China’s approach to the COVID-19 crisis could be the standard of care for global epidemics. However, as remarkable as the Chinese strategy might be, it cannot be replicated in other countries and certainly not in Europe. In Europe, there is a distribution of power between the European Union and its member states. In contrast, China’s political power is concentrated in the central government. This enables it to take immediate measures that affect (...) the entire country, such as massive quarantines or closing borders. Moreover, the Chinese legal framework includes restrictions on privacy and other human rights that are unknown in Europe. In addition, China has the technological power to easily impose such restrictions. In most European countries, that would be science fiction. These conditions have enabled China to combat epidemics like no other country can. However, the WHO might have been overoptimistic. The Chinese standard of care for treating COVID-19 also raises problematic issues for human rights, and the real consequences of these actions remain to be seen. (shrink)

Health care is increasingly delivered by using medical technologies and specialized procedures. However, the systems through which it is delivered are coming under attack as lacking in care. Medicine is very capable of treating the human body, but it may be losing its sensitivity towards persons, especially concerning the vulnerability they are experiencing. Nurses are finding that the demands for more efficiency and cost-effective measures do not allow them sufficient time to offer the personal care for (...) which they have always felt responsible. The question of the meaning of care surfaces especially in treating those who are approaching death. The need is to balance the various dimensions of care, keeping its focus on the well-being of persons. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an effective treatment for the debilitating motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. However, clinicians and commentators have noted that DBS recipients have not necessarily experienced the improvements in quality of life that would be expected, due in large part to what have been described as the ‘psychosocial’ impacts of DBS. The premise of this paper is that, in order to realise the full potential of DBS and similar interventions, clinical services need to (...) be arranged in such a way that these psychosocial dimensions are recognised and managed. Our starting point is that the psychosocial effects of DBS ‘in the field’ present us with analytically-useful disruptions: they disturb and foreground deeply held assumptions relating to the individual, health and its treatment, and which in a crude form manifest as the myth of technological solutionism within health care. Drawing on scholarship in medical sociology and science and technology studies (STS), we argue that DBS brings to the fore the relational dimensions of personhood, and demonstrates the emotional and social turmoil that can result if the relational dimensions of personhood are ignored by clinical services. In light of this, we argue that DBS should be implemented within a regime of care. Drawing on ethnographic research of a paediatric DBS clinical service, we provide an example of a regime of care, and conclude by reflecting on what other DBS services might learn from this paediatric service. (shrink)

The main interest of this book is to raise the very difficult question of the interrelation between technology and care. Its ambitious aim is to interpret technology and care as ….

In recent years, many in medical education have examined the question of how best to reinvigorate the doctor-patient relationship, given the increasing technological distance that has emerged between them in modern medicine. In this paper it is argued that “humanism” and caring in medicine reflect the quality of transitional relatedness in the illness condition, a significant separation-attachment phase of life. By improving our understanding of the origin of caring, educational strategies for physicians in training may improve as might our abilities (...) to provide care. (shrink)

Going through reproductive experiences (especially pregnancy and childbirth) in contemporary Western societies almost inevitably involves interaction with medical practitioners and various medical technologies in institutional context. This has important consequences for women as embodied subjects. A critical appraisal of these consequences—coming dominantly from feminist scholarship—relied on a problematic theory of both technology and the subject, which are in contemporary approaches no longer considered as given, coherent and well individualized wholes, but as complex constellations that are locally situated and that (...) can only be described empirically. In this study, we will be relying on the developments in phenomenological theory to reconceptualize women as technologically mediated embodied subjects and on the new paradigms in philosophy of technology and STS to reconstruct medical technology as situated—with the aim of reconceptualizing their relationship and exploring different possibilities for the mediating role of medical technology. It will be argued that technologization of female reproductive processes and alienating consequences for women are not necessary or directly interrelated. The role of technology varies from case to case and depends mainly on the nontechnological and relational aspects of institutional context, in which medical practitioners play a decisive role. (shrink)

Digital technologies induce organised immaturity by generating toxic sociotechnical conditions that lead us to delegate autonomous, individual, and responsible thoughts and actions to external technological systems. Aiming to move beyond a diagnostic critical reading of the toxicity of digitalisation, we bring Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological analysis of technology into dialogue with the ethics of care to speculatively explore how the socially engaged arts—a type of artistic practice emphasising audience co-production and processual collective responses to social challenges—play a care-giving (...) role that helps counter technology-induced organised immaturity. We outline and illustrate two modes by which the socially engaged arts play this role: 1) disorganising immaturity through artivism, most notably anti-surveillance art, that imparts savoir vivre, that is, shared knowledge and meaning to counter the toxic side of technologies while enabling the imagination of alternative worlds in which humans coexist harmoniously with digital technologies, and 2) organising maturity through arts-based hacking that imparts savoir faire, that is, hands-on knowledge for experimental creation and practical enactment of better technological worlds. (shrink)

How is the concept of patient care adapting in response to rapid changes in healthcare delivery and advances in medical technology? How are questions of ethical responsibility and social diversity shaping the definitions of healthcare? In this topical study, scholars in anthropology, nursing theory, law and ethics explore questions involving the changing relationship between patient care and medical ethics. Contributors address issues that challenge the boundaries of patient care, such as: · HIV-related care and research · (...) the impact of new reproductive technologies · preventative healthcare · technological breakthroughs that are changing personal-caring relationships. Chapters range from a consideration of the practicalities of nursing and family healthcare to a debate about ‘universal human needs’ and patients’ rights. This book is a provocative exploration of the ways in which healthcare models are socially constructed. It will be of interest to policy-makers, medical practitioners and administrators, as well as students of sociology, anthropology and social policy. (shrink)

This book highlights both the relation between technology and care, and the normative aspects of economic analyses in health care. A series of concrete examples from various clinical fields (prenatal diagnosis, genetic tests, digital imaging in psychiatry, tube feeding in care for the elderly, and palliative sedation) helps the authors to consider how to integrate these technologies in a care context aimed upon humaneness. Each topic is analysed by leading European clinicians and health care (...) ethicists. (shrink)

In this article we briefly summarize how converging technologies challenge elements of the existing symbolic order, as shown in the contributions to this special issue. We then identify the vision of ‘life as a do it yourself kit’ as a common denominator in the various forms of convergence and proceed to show how this vision provokes unrest and debate about existing moral frameworks and taboos. We conclude that, just as the problems of the industrial revolution sparked off the now (...) broadly established ideal of sustainability the converging technologies should be governed by the ideal of ‘human sustainability’. The essence of this ideal is formed by the ongoing discussion about the extent to which we may, or should want to, ‘make’ our environment and ourselves, and when it is better to simply accept what is given and what happens to us. (shrink)

Nurses have traditionally been regarded as clinicians that deliver compassionate, safe, and empathetic health care (Nurses again outpace other professions for honesty & ethics, 2018). Caring is a fundamental characteristic, expectation, and moral obligation of the nursing and caregiving professions (Nursing: Scope and standards of practice, American Nurses Association, Silver Spring, MD, 2015). Along with caring, nurses are expected to undertake ever‐expanding duties and complex tasks. In part because of the growing physical, intellectual and emotional demandingness, of nursing as (...) well as technological advances, artificial intelligence (AI) and AI care robots are rapidly changing the healthcare landscape. As technology becomes more advanced, efficient, and economical, opportunities and pressure to introduce AI into nursing care will only increase. In the first part of the article, we review recent and existing applications of AI in nursing and speculate on future use. Second, situate our project within the recent literature on the ethics of nursing and AI. Third, we explore three dominant theories of caring and the two paradigmatic expressions of caring (touch and presence) and conclude that AI—at least for the foreseeable future—is incapable of caring in the sense central to nursing and caregiving ethics. We conclude that for AI to be implemented ethically, it cannot transgress the core values of nursing, usurp aspects of caring that can only meaningfully be carried out by human beings, and it must support, open, or improve opportunities for nurses to provide the uniquely human aspects of care. (shrink)

In critical care medicine, teaching and mentoring practices are extremely important in regard to attracting and retaining young trainees and faculty in this important subspecialty that has a scarcity of needed personnel in the USA. To this end, we argue that Foucault’s Technologies of the Self is critical background reading when endeavoring to effect the positive transformation of faculty into effective teachers and mentors.

In this paper, I will argue that there is a deep connection between home-based care, technology, and the self. Providing the means for persons to receive care at home is not merely a kindness that respects their preference to be at home: it is an important means of extending their selfhood and respecting the unique selves that they are. Home-based technologies like telemedicine and robotic care may certainly be useful tools in providing care for persons (...) at home, but they also have important implications for sustaining selfhood in ways that are of value to individuals and those who care for them. I will argue, by appealing to Hilde Lindemann’s notion of “holding” persons’ identities in place, that technological interventions are not only useful tools for improving and sustaining health and good care at home, but that they may also help to extend our personal identities and relational capacities in ways that are practically and ethically good. Because of these important goods, I will claim that there is a prima facie moral duty to do this “holding” work and that it is best done by family members and loved ones who are well suited to the job because of their history and relationship with the individual that needs to be “held” in place. (shrink)

LARSEN A‐C. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 334–344 Trappings of technology: casting palliative care nursing as legal relationsCommunity palliative care nurses in Perth have joined the throng of healthcare workers relying on personal digital assistants (PDAs) to store, access and send client information in ‘real time’. This paper is guided by Heidegger’s approach to technologies and Habermas’ insights into the role of law in administering social welfare programs to reveal how new ethical and legal understandings regarding patient information (...) add to nursing’s professional responsibilities. This qualitative research interprets data from interviews with twenty community palliative care nurses about clients’ legal rights to informational privacy and confidentiality. It explores nurses’ views of their nursing responsibilities regarding clients’ legal rights, liability issues, bureaucratic monitoring and enforcement procedures. It concludes that nurses and clients are construed as legal subjects entrenched in legal relations that have magnified since these nurses began using PDAs in 2005/2006. (shrink)

Responding to Ike Kamphof’s “Webcams to save nature: Online space as affective and ethical space,” this essay considers the further contextualization of Kamphof’s analysis using the idea of agencement and the provocation to consider further the politics of affect.