Miquel Domènech

Ethical implications of home telecare for older people: a framework derived from a multisited participative study

Telecare and telehealth developments have recently attracted much attention in research and service development contexts, where their evaluation has predominantly concerned effectiveness and efficiency. Their social and ethical implications, in contrast, have received little scrutiny.

Embodying autonomy in a Home Telecare Service

increasing ageing population. 2 Telecare, actually, has now turned into a technical solution broad enough to manage many different kinds of problems, from health problems to social problems, and is adaptable enough to take into account individual and very contextual necessities (see Koch, 2006), enabling elderly people to maintain their independent lifestyle as long as possible (see Milligan et al., 2006). Despite a wide variety of contexts of application and technological

Extituciones: del poder y sus anatomías

Francisco Javier Tirado y Miquel Domènech Arrancamos del vinculum en sí, de los pasajes y de las relaciones, sin aceptar como punto de partida ningún ser que no emerja de esta relación, que es a la vez colectiva, real y discursiva. Ni arrancamos desde los seres humanos, muy recientes, ni del lenguaje, todavía más reciente. El mundo del significado y el mundo del ser es un único y mismo mundo, el de la traducción, sustitución, delegación, del pasar.

Installing Telecare, Installing Users Felicity Conditions for the Instauration of Usership

This article reports on ethnographic research into the practical and ethical consequences of the implementation and use of telecare devices for older people living at home in Spain and the United Kingdom. Telecare services are said to allow the maintenance of their users’ autonomy through connectedness, relieving the isolation from which many older people suffer amid rising demands for care. However, engaging with Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature on “user configuration” and implementation processes, we argue here that neither services nor users preexist the installation of the service: they are better described as produced along with it. Moving beyond design and appropriation practices, our contribution stresses the importance of installations as specific moments where such emplacements take place. Using Etienne Souriau’s concept of instauration, we describe the ways in which, through installation work, telecare services “bring into existence” their very infrastructure of usership. Hence, both services and telecare users are effects of fulfilling the “felicity conditions” (technical, relational, and contractual) of an achieved installation.

On Inscriptions and Ex-Inscriptions: The Production of Immediacy in a Home Telecare Service

In this paper we explore from a topological perspective how immediate care is enacted in a home telecare service and critically discuss how immediacy is defined. One approach is to conceive immediate care delivering as dependant on how disciplined the home telecare service inscriptions are and therefore on how uneventful and smooth the assistance is. However, this paper aims to put forward a more complex explanation by pointing out that immediate care delivering is produced not only by expelling indeterminacy but also by taking advantage of it. In order to do this we will use Bachelards concept of ex-inscription to shed light on the practices and techniques that transform events into opportunities (rather than obstacles) for delivering immediate care to home telecare service users.

George Herbert Mead y la psicología social de los objetos

From several social sciences disciplines, for more than ten years, we are claiming about the necessity of a material semiology. Reality is eminently symbolic, but that feature is not only exclusive of textual and discursive realms. It has to do with objects and things, as well. How can we interpret objects and things? How can we manage those? What is actually their meaning? What is the relationship that links that meaning with the social? The answers will come along from the material culture proposals. But the elaboration of this one demands the revision of the G.H.Meads proposals. Four topics from George Herbert Meads broad and varied treatment of the physical object have been selected for examination: the function of objects in the definition of the bodily self and its environment; the phenomena of resistance and interiorization in the selfs contact with physical objects; the selfs identification with the world of physical object and the perceptual and manipulatory phases of the act. This paper reviews all these questions. And we will conclude that they constitute the first steps to outline a Social Psychology of the objects.Hace mas de una decada que diversas disciplinas de las ciencias sociales vindican la necesidad de una semiologia de lo material. Sin duda, la realidad social es eminentemente simbolica, pero tal simbolismo no se cine exclusivamente a lo textual, discursivo o linguistico. Existen practicas mas alla de esta dimension que producen sentido y significado. Los objetos y las cosas estan implicados en ellas. ?Que elementos definen semejante semiologia? ?Como hay que interpretar esas practicas? ?Como se relacionan con la produccion de lo social? Las respuestas vienen de la mano de la formulacion de una cultura material. Mas la elaboracion de esta exige la revision de las propuestas que al respecto realizo G.H.Mead. Efectivamente, en su obra es posible encontrar una explicacion para el papel que los objetos juegan en la constitucion y mantenimiento de identidades sociales, entender como confieren al self un ambiente estable y familiar, examinar como los actos de tocar y comprender, en tanto que relacion basica con lo material, detentan un papel clave en la construccion y mantenimiento de la realidad, y, en definitiva, observar como la relacion del self con el mundo fisico se configura como relacion social. En el presente trabajo revisaremos todas estas cuestiones. Y concluiremos que constituyen los primeros pasos para esbozar una Psicologia Social de los objetos

Extitutions and security: movement as code

How can we guarantee the security of our means of transport? How can we strengthen that of our communications? How can we keep our ideology or our market safe? Etc. In this context, the press has recently been asking whether it is possible to be 100% certain that a person is not concealing a dangerous item on passing through an airport control. Nonetheless, technical solutions may be about to alter the aforementioned scenario. Indeed, the authorities in a number of countries have decided to install scanners at airports that allow people to be completely undressed without having to remove their clothes. The protests which have been voiced, quite reasonably, against this measure have been completely stifled by arguments based on security. Just a glance at the press in any European country in the last few days will confirm this affirmation. The example of scanners has not been a random choice to begin this article. It has to do with the fact that airports are truly a unique place to illustrate one of the most characteristic phenomena of our current societies: the need to manage mobility and security in unison. However, from our point of view security is much more than an excuse for legitimising procedures for surveillance and control, or a characteristic feature of contemporary states. It constitutes the very logic of such states. It is characterised by circulation and movement, and it operates as an authentic code that is capable of generating new forms of sociality and regimes of power.

Not Just Software: Free Software and the (Techno) Political Action

The practice of developing and creating Free Software has been the centre of attention for studies related to economics, knowledge production, laws and the intellectual property framework. However, the practice that constitutes the initiative of Free Software also means a call to rethink current forms of political action and the in-depth meaning of what is understood as “political†. This constitutes the field which has been called techno-activism. Along these lines, the authors propose a particular reading of the political challenge that is Free Software from the standpoint of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) theoretical work. The authors put forward various contributions -regarding the organization, the agents and the form of political action- that they consider to pose a crisis for traditional proposals and urge society to renew its way of relating to information, the raw material upon which the current exercise of government and practices of techno-activist resistance rest.

Envejecer en casa con teleasistencia en España. Un análisis del discurso

Caring for the elderly is turning to forms of community care and home care. Telecare is one of those emergent modalities of caring. This article will explore the meanings that older people give to the experience of staying at home in later life by using telecare. Discourse analysis is used to examine a set of focus groups and interviews with telecare users from different cities of Catalonia (Spain). The outcomes include three interpretative repertoires that we called: “Aging at home”, “normal aging” and “unsafe aging”. For each repertoire we examine how the permanence of older people in their homes is accounted, and which role telecare plays in such experience.

George Herbert Mead and the social psichology of objects

From several social sciences disciplines, for more than ten years, we are claiming about the necessity of a material semiology. Reality is eminently symbolic, but that feature is not only exclusive of textual and discursive realms. It has to do with objects and things, as well. How can we interpret objects and things? How can we manage those? What is actually their meaning? What is the relationship that links that meaning with the social? The answers will come along from the material culture proposals. But the elaboration of this one demands the revision of the G.H.Meads proposals. Four topics from George Herbert Meads broad and varied treatment of the physical object have been selected for examination: the function of objects in the definition of the bodily self and its environment; the phenomena of resistance and interiorization in the selfs contact with physical objects; the selfs identification with the world of physical object and the perceptual and manipulatory phases of the act. This paper reviews all these questions. And we will conclude that they constitute the first steps to outline a Social Psychology of the objects.Hace mas de una decada que diversas disciplinas de las ciencias sociales vindican la necesidad de una semiologia de lo material. Sin duda, la realidad social es eminentemente simbolica, pero tal simbolismo no se cine exclusivamente a lo textual, discursivo o linguistico. Existen practicas mas alla de esta dimension que producen sentido y significado. Los objetos y las cosas estan implicados en ellas. ?Que elementos definen semejante semiologia? ?Como hay que interpretar esas practicas? ?Como se relacionan con la produccion de lo social? Las respuestas vienen de la mano de la formulacion de una cultura material. Mas la elaboracion de esta exige la revision de las propuestas que al respecto realizo G.H.Mead. Efectivamente, en su obra es posible encontrar una explicacion para el papel que los objetos juegan en la constitucion y mantenimiento de identidades sociales, entender como confieren al self un ambiente estable y familiar, examinar como los actos de tocar y comprender, en tanto que relacion basica con lo material, detentan un papel clave en la construccion y mantenimiento de la realidad, y, en definitiva, observar como la relacion del self con el mundo fisico se configura como relacion social. En el presente trabajo revisaremos todas estas cuestiones. Y concluiremos que constituyen los primeros pasos para esbozar una Psicologia Social de los objetos