113. Seeking Arrangements: Transactional Care in Machine-Mediated Worlds
Beth Semel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Mitali Thakor, Wesleyan University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
From Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011) call to consider ethical obligations to care along more-than-human networks, to critical race studies scholars’ insistence that intimate labor (Parreñas 2015), rather than being limited to individual professions, is central to the functioning of empire, feminist STS has long grappled with the politics of caring relations and technologies. Building from these works, this panel will interrogate care as transactional: a form of labor with economic value that is mediated, mechanized, and enables the thriving of some through the withdrawal of resources from others. Attending to the transactional components of care is evermore pressing as relations become increasingly mediated through the production of “surrogates” (cf. Atanasoski & Vora 2019) to support the technoliberal freedoms of the privileged few. Efforts to automate care work gloss over the racialized histories of domesticity and disposability that permeate service work in relation to slavery and its afterlives (Hartman 2006).
How, then, are transnational circuits of care encoded into the daily functions of global technocapitalism? Conversely, can transactional care have a radical capacity (Hobart & Kneese 2020) to disrupt or “short-circuit” extractive arrangements of exchange, stitching together new, more fluid and just ones?
We invite papers exploring efforts to augment care work through technology, such as nursing and sex companion robots and eldercare digital pets. We also invite work on technologically mediated care work at the margins of formal economies, codified, legal, and/or licit social services, including camming, gig/micro-work, data custodianship, “access work” (Hickman 2019), and digital mutual aid.
