Moving Beyond Clinical Imaginaries: Technogeographies of the Everyday Urban.

In this paper, we analyse the intersections between care and place in mundane spaces not explicitly designed for the provision of care, and where digital technologies are used to mediate ecologies of distress in the city. We locate our analysis alongside studies of how digital technologies impact the experience of care within non-clinical spaces, whilst noting that much research on the use of technologies for care remains haunted by clinical imaginaries. Bringing together ideas of multi-sited therapeutic assemblages, technogeographies of care, and how places-by-proxy can act as conduits for care, we explore an example of an online app being used in public space to manage experiences of anxiety in an everyday urban environment. We reflect on this illustrative example to trace the movement of care as it is mediated through digital technologies-out of the clinic, beyond the home, and into the ordinary spaces of the city. We conclude that the entanglements of digital technologies and ordinary urban places prompt us to entirely reconsider questions of the where of care.

Articulating mobile gendered landscapes: Thinking with care cultures.

This paper relates work on global neoliberal gendered labor to geographies of care and it provides a tangible example of culturally specific dimensions of the relationship between health and place. The context is a temporary work migration pattern of Bulgarian women in Italy, who provide 24/7, live-in care to elderly, often dying patients. Through a longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, this paper illustrates how mobile gendered landscapes are articulated and made meaningful by the research participants, offering a different reading of global care regimes. I argue that this articulation is a way of thinking with care cultures and showing how these are (re-)imagined by women who care in less than caring institutional/economic/familial landscapes. The paper contributes the concept 'care cultures' as a productive lens, through which to account for how place, people, ethics and care practices grow, merge and (mis-)align in attempts to construct and maintain meaningful lives.

Post-place care: disrupting place-care ontologies.

With the advent of telecare and the logic of information technologies in health care, the idea of placeless care has taken root, capturing imaginations and promising placeless caring futures. This 'de-territorialisation of care' has been challenged by studies of care practices 'on the ground', showing that care is always (materially) placed. Yet, while sociological scholarship has taken the role of place seriously, there is little conceptual attention for how we may think through immateriality and the changing nature of place in health care. Based on a case study of the introduction of a sensory reality technology into a care organisation, this paper argues that we need (1) to push the definition of placed care into new (digitally produced) landscapes and (2) a new vocabulary, with which to address and conceptualise this changing nature of care places. The paper introduces the term post-place, as a first step in developing such a vocabulary. Post-place care, unlike the idea of placeless care or emplaced care, is an inclusive, open and generative concept. Its strength lies in its disruptive potential for challenging existing place-care ontologies and opening up productive space for thinking through the changing landscapes of health care.

Care in place: A case study of assembling a carescape.

In this article we analyse the process of the multiple ways place and care shape each other and are co-produced and co-functioning. The resulting emerging assemblage of this co-constituent process we call a carescape. Focusing on a case study of a nursing home on a Dutch island, we use place as a theoretical construct for analysing how current changes in healthcare governance interact with mundane practices of care. In order to make the patterns of care in our case explicit, we use actor-network theory (ANT) sensibilities and especially the concept of assemblage. Our goal is to show - by zooming in on a particular case - how to study the co-constituent processes of place- and care-shaping, revealing the ontological diversity of place and care. Through this, we contribute a perspective of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of care in its dynamic relationship of co-production with place.