Abstract
Drawing on cultural studies’ strong history in challenging power relationships and highlighting the importance of the everyday for meaning and insights, this special issue calls for care to be taken seriously – particularly in shifting and diversifying cultural imaginaries of future work, ageing, life, and death. Published in the context of a global pandemic, in which contexts of care visibly collapsed or overlapped, it is a timely focus. As this special issue shows, the rapid increase of ageing populations has brought explorations of the potential of new technological services involving artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation. These forms of non-human care are increasingly normalized and practised through wearable safety devices, mobile phones, apps, robots, virtual reality, and digitally assisted interactions with animals. All of these operate as caregiving agencies intended to support, replace, and enhance human-to-human labours of care.
Caring with and through communication media is central to methods and modes of being in the world with others. The centrality of communication media in care – whether at a distance, together, co-presently, or ambiently – has been heightened in the global pandemic. Digital caring media and technology are highlighted in diverse fields of contemporary studies, including cultural studies (Lagerkvist, 2019; Reading, 2009; Schwartz, 2019), science and technology studies (STS; see Pols, 2012; Taipale, 2015; Vincent, 2015), and arts and design (Avram et al., 2019; Costanza-Chock, 2020; Light and Akama, 2014). Feminist scholars such as Annemarie Mol (2010*08 in refs*), Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) and Donna Haraway (2016) have led the way by exploring care relationalities, with emphases on media, technologies and the more-than-human. As a concept that has been historically ‘feminized’, care has multiple dimensions and modes, including affective labour and pastoral care, many of which have been devalued.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, media broadly were exposed as a vital lifeline in the wider health implications of pandemic lockdowns and social (physical) distancing, ranging from bottom-up community endeavours (e.g. Covid-19 Mutual Aid UK) to supporting the mental health implications of isolation, loneliness, and restricted living spaces. Popular news articles and images showed the magnitude of the rapidly changing situation, as well as the disparity of living and dying conditions across the world and, at the same time, people reaching out to show care and affection through screens. Boundaries between mourners and witnesses continue to blur (Papailias, 2017), highlighting the increasingly complex and affective role of witnessing and through this act and action, the crucial need to recognize the new models and modalities of care. Using the example of the Alan Kurdi image – in which a drowned young boy came to encapsulate the grief of the Syrian refugee crisis – anthropologist Penelope Papailias argues that the role of ‘affect’ in witnessing today through media requires us to re-examine loss and social care as part of (non-mediated) everyday life. Drawing on Judith Butler, she argues that these moments of loss can bring us together to enact social change at the same time as they illustrate the inequalities of bodies – that some bodies matter more than others.
Media and its role in witnessing has provided various windows for reflection. Likewise, media images revealed people standing outside windows at the homes of elderly family and at aged care facilities. Care was expressed through social media as strangers shared their place in the world on sites like ‘View from My Window’ (Facebook group created by Barbara Duriau) and ‘WindowSwap’ (sites include Instagram, www.window-swap.com and others). The pandemic has intensified labours of care not just in the existentially fraught frontline of hospitals, but in domestic spaces too. The loss or withdrawal of hands-on external supports and the introduction of prohibitive movement, and the economic, physical, psychological, and emotional impacts are considerable. This phenomenon has been particularly relevant in relation to childcare, schooling, disability, and elder care with its impact felt most deeply by those who are already marginalized such as immigrants, gender-diverse people, and those who are engaged in informal or contractually precarious labour.
At the same time, enhanced use of media and on-screen communication during the pandemic opened up greater visibility and even forms of the intimate witnessing of lives in and across the different domains of care. For example, paid work that was able to be relocated at home sometimes put caring responsibilities ‘on screen’ when previously these would have been spatially displaced and certainly expected to be ‘off screen’. An anecdote shared with one of the editors was the impact on a friend’s daughter in an online school class who saw that her teacher had a child with a disability, audible and on screen in the background. This unexpected insight into a teacher’s life is educative, constituting a form of exposure (even an ethics of exposure) to a life of disability care beyond the institutional teacher role.
In many parts of the world, images of empty streets previously occupied by street vendors and other forms of informal economic activities made explicit the need for urgent questioning about what and who had been (in)visible to whom. The pandemic inadvertently exposed worlds that were less visible, or were elided by those in more privileged positions, necessitating serious critique, reflection and, importantly, urgent action on the masculinist cultural and structural value of covering over and discounting these informal labours of care, and their invisible co-presence (particularly in terms of thought and emotion) in diverse forms of everyday work and living.
Two questions come to the fore at the intersection of care and media, particularly in relation to globally increasing life expectancy and acutely ageing populations: how is the role of digital health being framed and implemented in ways that defy the dominant technocratic and technosolutionist (Morozov, 2013) discourse? And what role could cultural and media studies play in conceptualizing the complex intersections between care and media practice? Feminist research and debate around robotics and automation has certainly highlighted intersections between class, race and gender in a cost-effectiveness nexus between care work undertaken by machines, robots, and so on versus care work undertaken by humans. The labour in this global chain is predominantly provided by immigrant women in the global south to service the global north, often at the cost of relinquishing their bonds of love and care in their homelands (Hochschild and Ehrenreich, 2003; Pyle, 2006). There is also a critical, messy tension and nexus between wealthy nations exploiting the care work of women coming from the global south, racist anti-immigration pro-nationalist discourse and policies seeking to prohibit the movement of ‘others’, and the drive towards robotics and automation as a solution in future care labour (French, 2003).
The rise of the ubiquitous smartphone means that much of our lives and the lives of others are being constantly curated through algorithmic automation. As Penelope Papailias notes, smartphones have become devices for and of ‘affective witnessing’ (2016) – that is, the effect of the images is to collapse boundaries between mourners and witnesses, expanding worlds of intimate witnessing and connectivity between strangers (Gibson, 2007). Moreover, smartphones as personal media technologies are also vehicles for what Arlie Hochschild called ‘emotional labour’ (1983) – the performative dimensions of emotions and expectations in the ‘work’ contexts. With mobile media collapsing contexts (Boyd, 2010; Gregg, 2011), boundaries between official work and non-work, life and death contexts blur. Mobile media provide particular contexts that amplify feelings of intimacy, co-presence and affect – what Kathleen Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth (2017) call ‘mobile-emotive’ contexts. These ‘mobile-emotive’ contexts reframe experiences of trauma and loss into continuity and ‘continuing bonds’ – highlighting the role of mobile media in connecting more quotidian understandings of loss and trauma as part of everyday life.
This special issue recognizes the importance of media cultures and technologies in both questioning and enabling affective care at a distance and mobile intimacies in the provision of formal and informal, paid and unpaid care. Globally, the rapid growth in ageing populations has fuelled exploration of the possibilities of high-tech support and services in the form of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation. These forms of care are increasingly normalized and practised through wearable safety devices, mobile phones, apps, robots, virtual reality, and robot animals. Technocratic aspirations render these caregiving agents as supports, replacements or augmentations of human-to-human labours of care. But these media technologies raise important questions about design and implementation. For example, whether these enhance or prevent some forms of care happening (because they are cheaper or more ‘efficient’ than human care). Design and implementation can thereby complicate the agency, privacy, sociality, imagination, and quality of life not only of those in or receiving care, but also other agents in care ecologies (Costanza-Chock, 2020; Escobar, 2018).
Thus, taking care seriously requires political questioning, and action aimed at recalibrating the ways in which care has been feminized and undervalued socially and economically, despite its pivotal role in all forms of living. What are the limitations of ‘careful media’ in the rise of automation? How are technologies of different scales and intentions being designed carefully to reflect the dignity of human and other-than-human lives? How can cultural studies researchers centre care in and across their methods, theories and implementation? How might cultural studies bring a critical lens to care practices as they are imagined in tech industries, social services, media discourses and practices? And, lastly, how might this critical lens bring into focus temporalities and embodiments of care through media forms and practices towards future cultures of care?
Caring Media Futures brings together a variety of interdisciplinary articles exploring how care cultures are shaping, and being shaped by, media practices and theories. Drawing on cultural studies’ strong history in challenging power relationships and highlighting the importance of the everyday for meaning and insights, this special issue calls for care to be taken seriously – particularly in shifting and diversifying cultural imaginaries of future work, life, and death. This special issue coalesces methodologies and theories that take seriously the role of care in and around everyday media practice. Many of the articles draw from ethnographic fieldwork to bring empirical insights to recalibrate theoretical frameworks. In particular, the articles in this special issue touch upon three key areas – informal care and health; care and everyday life (rituals); care and media practice.
Informal care and health
In this special issue we begin with articles that explore the role of technology around informal and public health discourses, focusing on the role of care as a guiding practice and set of ethical frameworks. The first article, by Andrejevic et al., explores ‘careful surveillance’ – ‘a term that acknowledges the often conflicted and paradoxical relation between caring, watching, guardianship and control’ (Richardson et al., 2017). The authors argue that the relationality between ‘modalities of care and the formal and informal surveillance strategies’ are being transformed by ‘perceptions, practices and attitudes around care-based monitoring, shaped by individual beliefs and attitudes, collective mores and habitudes, and epidemiological and public health knowledges’ during the pandemic. Using the example of the Australian context, in which lockdown processes and procedures were uneven, this article reflects upon what social surveillance means in a time of the pandemic – including how acts of ‘prosocial’ care enacted by social distancing and mask wearing are perceived and how they transform what it means to be bodies in public spaces.
This special issue includes three articles focusing on Japan, the country with proportionally the largest ageing population in the world, and one of the lowest birth rates. These articles draw attention to different care needs and practices resulting from this unprecedented demographic change. The second article in this issue, by Hjorth and Lupton, reflects upon practices and perceptions around the role of technologies to care for the ageing in Japan. Although Japan is often fetishized in discussions of robots and AI innovation, in practice a different reading is needed, as illustrated in this article. Drawing on ethnography with Japanese families, the article explores intergenerational ‘digitalized caring intimacies’ and how they contribute to digital kinship, mediated co-presences, and care relations. In particular, the article argues that these practices involve enactments of care that may be considered benevolent and intimate forms of datafication and dataveillance which disrupt traditional face-to-face forms of health care.
Care and everyday life (rituals)
The third and fourth articles both address social adaptions, cultural transformations and future possibilities in death ritual and caring for the dead through robotics and automation. The article by Gould et al., titled ‘Robot death care: A study of funerary practice’, poses the question: ‘What makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead?’ by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. This article draws on the cultural aspects of robots and automation and includes the geographical and cultural contexts of the US and Japan to bring broader social and historical examples of the emergence and affordances of robotics and automation in rituals of caring for the dead. The article suggests that when robots become caring actors in matters of death ritual, a pervasive popular culture representation of the robot as the violent giver of death can shift towards less anxious and potentially more positive cultural images of robots in caring futures.
Anthropologist Anne Allison’s article provides a detailed ethnographic case study exploring automated graves in Japan, showing them as vehicles for understanding the ‘precarity and prosthetics of caring for the dead’. Drawing from a longitudinal ethnography of the changing role of practices and rituals of death and dying practices in Japan, Allison’s article takes a deep dive into the cultural nuances informing the relationship between death, the afterlife, care and media. As Allison argues, the decline of births in Japan raises issues around the continuity of practices that involve human care and tethering – for example, who tends to the graves of the dead if there is no family left? For Allison, the ‘precarity of care’ (2013) has become heightened as a result – that is, there is ‘a scarcity of . . . others to do the work of burying and memorializing the dead that the deceased can’t do [for] themselves.’ This article presents a richly nuanced reflection on how care of the dead is being redesigned with ‘prosthetic sociality’ in exploring the question ‘how is sociality getting reshaped and restaged in new designs given to the dead in Japan today?’
Care and media practice
The role of media in caring for ageing populations continues in the fifth article, ‘No future without caring media? Making time(s) for mediated informal care practices in later life’, by García-Santesmases et al. Drawing on an ethnographic study of people in their eighties in Barcelona, the article conceptualizes four temporalities of mediated informal care in the STS vein around care and infrastructures (Leigh-Star, 1999; Mol et al., 2010). This article is also contextualized by austerity issues in Spain, and the pressure and increased need placed on informal care practices to include the use of media technologies.
García-Santesmases et al. explore, for example, the way Facebook or WhatsApp serve either to leverage social encounters among older people or strengthen informal and intergenerational proximal support. The authors identify the lack of understanding of the use of mundane ICTs (information and communication technologies) for informal care as a critical research gap in the intersection of technology and care for older adults. In addressing this gap, the authors argue that informal care has two key aspects: ‘caring for, as the instrumental work that somebody does when it is literally attending another person; and caring about, the emotional relation and concern about someone else’.
In the issue’s sixth article, ‘Making players care: The ambivalent cultural politics of care and video games’, Ruberg and Scully-Blaker explore the implications and ethics of designing for care in video games where ‘players take care of someone or something over time, such as an animal, a child, plants, or a town’. Their article examines the central feminist question: ‘What or who do mainstream video games take care of?’ Drawing out this question further, they ask: ‘When video games and care meet, who is cared for? What is cared about? Does this create new possibilities for resistance, or does it reinforce the status quo, a system of privilege that dictates which lives merit care and in which ways?’
Feminist theorists Sara Ahmed and Sara Sharma provide theoretical guidance in Ruberg and Scully-Blaker’s article and its critical exploration of game design politics and gaps between intention and effects. The authors suggest, for example, that care must be taken to critically explore the way designing for empathy training can reinforce the very marginalization it seeks to challenge. And they further argue that a ‘thoughtful consideration of care and its relationship to video games must confront the fact that the cultural politics of these dynamics are multifaceted, troubled, and by extension generative’. They conclude that ‘the critique of video games and the critique of the cultural rhetoric that surrounds them [is entangled] in the work of care’.
The seventh and final article, by Lin and Yang, reflects upon the role smartphones play in disability care in China. The article brings together media studies, disability studies and cultural studies to deploy an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approach to the smartphone as a key actor of the emerging digital disability care actor network in contemporary China. In the context of China, disability care is a family responsibility with the state taking a central role only in the absence of familial care provision. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviews in a project trajectory of over two years, the article explores how the digital disability care actor network can be conceptualized through an understanding of everyday informal caring practices and the role of smartphones and app cultures supporting lives for increasing independence and sociality within and beyond families. It examines how apps such as WeChat and QQ have active disability communities, supporting shopping, travel, navigation, access to medical support, and food delivery services, while other apps (sometimes by design) are not disability friendly. Lin and Yang’s article also considers the economic value of smartphones for care at a distance in the working lives of households in China with a disabled family member, which, in the context of international benchmarks are 30% less well-off in China in economic terms than families without a disabled family member.
Caring media in cultural studies: provocations
One of the provocations that this special issue raises is a tension between care at a distance and deliberate, cost-cutting forms of distancing care: the former enables and supports informal, affective care relations through mobile ambient medias while the latter can amplify existing forms of isolation and marginalization, particularly in relation to elderly citizens. The experience of the pandemic requires us to rethink the role of media to care at a distance across various remits and contexts. Specifically, this is about how care can be central in the implementation of automation and robotics in aged care, where social isolation, body politics of abjection, and skin-to-skin contact in positive, loving ways, can often already be in deficit. This is particularly the case for elderly people, where regular touch-based affective care with loved ones is infrequent or indeed lost in the trajectory of their lives.
By exploring three key interrelated areas – care and media practice, informal care and health, and care and everyday life (rituals) – this special issue seeks to provide examples of models and practices at the intersection of care and media to help us reconceptualize this synthesis. During the pandemic we have witnessed first-hand the globally uneven way in which digital media can both enhance social connection and place limits on this engagement. We witnessed how unevenly different cultures and people grappled with media to care at a distance. The role of media in both enhancing and detracting from rituals of care during physical distancing was most apparent during the pandemic. It was seen, for example, in images of older adults behind windows in quarantined aged care facilities, unable to have contact with their family and friends for over eight months. And in images of Covid-19 patients surrounded by medical equipment and clinicians in PPE gear, dying without touching their family or friends. And it was seen in images of the mass graves of people who have died from Covid-19, representative of systems in overload. All these vignettes have created a type of affective witnessing in which the divide between the mourners and the witness, or the care giver and receiver collapses, and we are asked to take seriously the role and reciprocity of care ethically, conceptually, and in practice (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). The textures of grief and loss engulfing the world as it struggles with the pandemic – and more generally climate disaster – require a more complex, comprehensive, and nuanced model for care as a crucial part of not only contemporary but also future-making practice.
As this special issue identifies, the intersection of care and media is a crucial one. It is in the overlap that we understand how we represent, experience and memorialize our lives. Care here can be framed as not only a series of methodologies but also epistemologies – that is, a way of being and knowing in the world. Whether it is a moral-ethical imperative, an instinct of survival, or a social responsibility, care and caring are fundamental to human existence and its surviving and thriving in an existential reality of finitude. Caring for oneself and for others, and the attitude of ‘care-fulness’, typifies being a ‘human being’; to ‘care’ is the essence, the structure of being (Kleinman and van der Geest, 2009: 160). Care is therefore not something added on to human existence but constitutive of human beingness as fundamentally relational to include more-than-human forms of existential entanglement.
Held together in bonds of love, duty, obligation, and countless other ways that vary for each agent, caring is ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it well’ (Engster, 2005: 50). As this special issue demonstrates, there are various lessons across different cultural contexts – care is relational. The various articles highlight different ways of experiencing and conceptualizing caring media in present forms and future directions that have been explored through cultural studies of Japan, China, Australia, Spain and the US. We also acknowledge that academic journals published in English inevitably circumscribe a wider net of researchers and voices from many other languages. Therefore, this special issue has created within limits a ‘culture of polyvocality . . . in which disenfranchised voices can arise and be heard, so that we can exist together in feminist juxtapositions of thinkings and doings’ (Choi and Light, 2020). One aspect we believe this special issue emphasizes/gives voice to/highlights is the globally shared practices of care that are nevertheless also culturally and contextually nuanced. Numerous in subjects and concerns, the articles in this special issue hope to provide a space for exploration, discussion and contestation, and ways of positioning and ethically imagining and practising caring media futures.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.