New Technologies and Emerging Spaces of Care

Book excerpt: New Technologies and Emerging Spaces of Care provides the latest practice-oriented qualitative research and innovative conceptual discussions of how health and health care systems are currently dealing with complex transformations and varied reforms. Exploring and analysing the social and cultural impact of new technologies, this book examines the societal relevance of new technologies of care and the manner in which technological innovations configure and reconfigure institutionalized spaces of care. It addresses issues of social control, accountability, surveillance and disciplining; diverging patterns of inclusion and exclusion; new relations and subjectivities of patients and care givers; the relation between private and public forms of care and the practices and concerns generated by new technologies at the individual as well as the societal level. Presenting sophisticated theoretical discussions and detailed empirical case studies, New Technologies and Emerging Spaces of Care analyses, compares and evaluates on a transnational level the role and impact of (assistive) technologies for elderly and disabled people on the concepts and practices of spaces of care. A critical understanding of contemporary practices of care, that cuts through the growing conceptual barriers between social and medical models of care studies, this book will be of interest to those interested in new technologies, health care and social space of care. Specifically, it will appeal to scholars of science and technology studies, medical sociology and the sociology of the body, social inequality and exclusion, health and care studies, gerontology and disability studies.