Careful Digital Kinship: Understanding Multispecies Digital Kinship, Choreographies of Care and Older Adults During the Pandemic in Australia

Abstract

During the pandemic many aspects of our life were recalibrated through the digital—highlighting the paradoxes of the digital for both empowerment and exploitation. In particular, the pandemic demonstrated the increasing role of the digital in shaping, and being shaped by, kinship. Kinship is a complex term that captures our relationality, intimacies and connections. Kinship is always in action, always becoming. Throughout the pandemic, some cohorts such as older adults (65 years +) were disproportionally disadvantaged due to the uneven digital literacies skills. In this article I expand upon the role of digital kinship as part of human and more-than-human choreography of (informal) care for older adults in Australia. I also reflect on the role of creative forms of knowledge transmission such as illustrations and placemaking games to curate public awareness and enact change.

Responsibility, care and repair in/of AI: Extinction threats and more-than-real worlds

“…Careful digital kinship offers another productive avenue for thinking differently about human–digital relations. Building on geographies of care scholarship, Hjorth (2022) develops the notion of careful digital kinship to explain the entanglement of digital, social and cultural worlds in material and immaterial contexts, and to emphasise relationality and continuity rather than disruption. As a concept, careful digital kinship builds on this geographies of care research in a productive way with an emphasis on social media care relations.…”

“Live Gerontology”: Understanding and Representing Aging, Loneliness, and Long-Term Care Through Science and Art

“…Curating a live gerontology entails embracing this creative multiplicity in critical ways, allowing for new partnerships and pathways to emerge. Examples can be found in studies on older people’s use of digital media during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic to enact care and kinship at a distance, within intergenerational and multispecies relationships ( Hjorth, 2022 ). Through digital ethnography, creative prompts-interviews, digital storytelling, photo probes of everyday life, and a placemaking mobile game based on QR codes (which turned pet walking into a treasure hunt, affording opportunities for community connection), Hjorth and her interdisciplinary team mapped the pandemic choreographies of care of older adults and their families and companion animals through digital media practices.…”

“…Through digital ethnography, creative prompts-interviews, digital storytelling, photo probes of everyday life, and a placemaking mobile game based on QR codes (which turned pet walking into a treasure hunt, affording opportunities for community connection), Hjorth and her interdisciplinary team mapped the pandemic choreographies of care of older adults and their families and companion animals through digital media practices. This inventiveness was not acritical, showing the “choreographies of care in and through digital media provide multiple obstacles and opportunities” for older people, like decreasing/increasing social connection ( Hjorth, 2022 , p. 238).…”

Researching (im)mobile lives during a lockdown: Reconceptualizing remote interviews as field events

“…This study deploys a socio material perspective on unpacking the use of digital technologies in remote interviewing. As a start, we discuss our reflections on several studies on technological, social, and even contextual factors shaping digital behaviours (Hjorth, 2022; Watson et al, 2020). These studies show how the use of digital media during a lockdown facilitated connection at a distance as well as led to fatigue.…”

“…These studies have argued that technologies actively influence people's relations, reshape care practices and reorganize healthcare routines. Importantly, it takes into account how social relations and kinship mediate digital practices (Hjorth, 2022; Hjorth et al, 2020). To date, few studies have specifically applied the socio material approach in examining the outcomes of conducting remote and mediated data collection (see Watson and Lupton, 2022; Watson et al, 2021).…”