The Caring Futures domain

Exploring if and how care is being reconfigured through sociodigital arrangements and what opportunities this might create for how care is understood and can be reimagined.

Understanding how care is experienced in intimate relationships and within the body are key interests for the domain which centres on how we can use digital technologies to better understand the experience of providing and receiving care in relational assemblages. Projects include:

Bodies of care

Focuses on how social VR experience Soma, an hour-long collective participatory experience, can enable participants to explore multi sensorial and relational encounters that consider touch, intimacy, relationships, trust and wellness in a range of care contexts. The piece explores the tension between somatic experience, our capacity to sense and feel our living and moving bodies, and the ocular centric realm of VR technology through the negotiation of bodies inhabiting both physical and virtual environments. We will employ Soma as a methodological tool to disrupt notions of empathy, immersion and presence in VR environments that may point to different future potentials for immersive technologies within care provisions.

Objects of care

In collaboration with an arts-based charity and a creative technologist and taking a sociomaterial standpoint, this project utilises digital prototype trove to reimagine futures of care for and with care experienced children, young people and their families as we engage in digital autobiographical storying through loved and found objects that enable children agency over disrupted memories. We are particularly interested in the extent to which the Sociodigital object facilitates multiple temporalities and enables imaginative futuring.

Places and Spaces of care

Using a diffracted lens (Barad, 2007) to think with/ about care in intangible spaces, we engage in provocations for how we might better feel, know, and care for (and thus act on/re-make the futures of) the intangible aspects of the spaces and places we inhabit, and our bodies in these environments. We will use VR technology to mediate experiences of simulated watery and airy worlds, which mix with materialities of the physical world, to speculate on future environments, and question how we might inhabit and care for / as them.

Further reading (blog): Repurposing ‘trove’: space, times and bodies by Lisa May Thomas.

Smart living: Everyday family life in the digital age

This project uses an innovative mixed-methods approach to further understanding of the ways in which families’ everyday lives are mediated by smart technologies and how the affordances of the internet of things and messaging technologies are used to ‘do’ family. Current research in this area tends to range from ‘solutions’ applied to specific needs, to critiques focusing on the dangers of habituating to technological dependency and routine sharing of personal data with commercial interests. This will be the first study to use a mix of in-depth interviews, data donation and child-led methods to explore how families incorporate technologies in under-researched, mundane, everyday aspects of home life.

Find out more about getting involved.

Meet the caring domain team