Performing the care crisis through the datafication of elderly welfare care

Abstract

Demographic changes associated with contemporary society are often framed as a ‘care crisis’ where the aging population is portrayed as threatening the financial security and the future of younger generations. To rationally intervene in these issues, welfare states–particularly in Nordic countries–increasingly rely on digital technology as a ‘remedy’ and ‘promise’ of more effective and efficient public governance operating through technopolitical care practices and logics. Technological solutions such as AI, algorithms, apps and robotics are incorporated into elderly care and aligned with care work where the digitization of processes accompanies an intensification of datafication of elderly welfare care. This analysis is aimed at identifying and discussing how the welfare state is transformed through a practice of classification and its logic of standardization, a practice of taskification grounded on time-paced service logic, and a practice of categorization relying on a logic of prioritization. These three practices and logics embody tensions emerging where caring intersects with data sourcing, that is, where the datafication of elderly welfare care lies. Feminist posthumanism allows approaching them by resisting both techno-utopian and techno-dystopian claims about the datafication of elderly welfare care.