Complicit Bodies: A Carnal Sociology of Robot Interactions in Dementia Care

This article examines the embodied entanglement of the ethnographic researcher in the social dynamics surrounding robot animals in dementia care. Drawing on multi-sited focused fieldwork in Swedish and French care homes, informed by Wacquant’s carnal sociology and Lydahl’s situated shadowing, we explore four registers: when residents find the researcher more compelling than the robot; when care workers stage performances for the watching researcher; when the researcher becomes an improvised care partner; and when the researcher actively shapes the robot encounter’s therapeutic framing. Across all four, the researcher’s body is enrolled into the care ecology and the interactional realities through which robot encounters become meaningful. We also identify four modes through which the therapeutic framing of the robot as a living animal is sustained: designed, ecological, passive, and active. Complicity in these interactional accomplishments is not a methodological failure but a condition of access, and in certain circumstances a form of care. Throughout the fieldwork, robots most effectively facilitated encounters between residents and researchers when they were engaged with as living beings, rendering both humans and robots complicit bodies. Implications are drawn for carnal reflexivity, field note practice, and ethical protocols in research involving cognitive vulnerability and assistive technology.