Aging in place, the option to grow old in one's home instead of institutional healthcare facilities, is predicated on the development of technologies and resources that network patients, caregivers, medical personnel, and third party interlocutors. Monitoring systems and other information technologies are broadly considered to be the most promising means to establish these connections, and home care technologies for elderly people with dementia comprise one of the fastest growing areas of commercial development. Grounded in the political economy of aging and understood as surveillance, monitoring technologies for the elderly highlight sociopolitical responses to aging and dementia and raise critical questions about caregiving, quality of life, and the way technological design engages with everyday rights. This paper will analyze surveillance technologies for the elderly with attention to issues of power and inequality, and how these dynamics may or may not be considered in technological design for the oldest populations

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Breakdown, trespass, seepage, degradation: this is late industrialism. Over the past decade, the term has become synonymous with collapse, describing everything from crumbling infrastructure to outmoded paradigms. But the “late” in “late industrial” carries radical potential, too. It points toward the possibility of another world taking shape within the wreckage as people retrofit broken systems, build flexible coalitions, and work creatively with time. In this collection, we train our eyes on these refashionings, asking how late industrial systems might be put to life-affirming work. Specifically, we track cases where breath, air, and atmosphere help inaugurate a “phase shift” (Choy and Zee 2015) from breakdown toward worlds otherwise. Breath has sentinel qualities: it can warn of trouble in the air. But it is also an animating force. Taking conceptual cues from this duality, contributors attend to late industrialism as it is sensed and transformed into something vital.

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