Technogeographies of care work: Negotiating automation in eldercare institutions from immediacy to intimacy

Automation in German eldercare institutions is reshaping how care work is organized by reconfiguring its spatial and temporal conditions. Debates on care automation are frequently organized around the ideal of immediacy . Digitalization strategies in Germany promote the use of new software and assistive technologies to streamline care amid labor shortages and rising demands for care. This article asks how immediate care is produced in eldercare institutions through technology. Drawing on ethnographic research in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, the article foregrounds how care workers and technologies participate in configuring what counts as ‘immediate’ and ‘good’ care. The article traces how care workers appropriate, adjust, or resist digital systems and devices, thereby producing new kinds of immediacies within institutional settings. In doing so, the article shifts attention from immediacy to intimacy , showing how technologies participate in the ongoing negotiation of proximity and distance in care work. Building on feminist care scholarship and Science and Technology Studies, the article reworks digitized eldercare as a situated socio-technical practice in which care workers actively negotiate flexibility, proximity, and intimacy. A spatial perspective on the micropolitics of these processes expands previous elaborations on care and technology. By shifting the analytical focus from immediacy to intimacy, the article offers a new perspective on how ‘good‘care is enacted in increasingly automated institutional spaces.