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Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. With 11 international and comparative case studies, it offers a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship and explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed. This chapter available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence

This chapter illustrates the empirical and processual study of affect. By drawing on a posthumanist practice theory, we conceive a research practice as an agencement of heterogeneous elements that achieve agency by entanglement, focusing on how affect realizes ‘agencing’. We experiment with ‘slow seeing’ as a research practice in our engagement with the digital materiality of a video produced for promoting welfare technologies in Sweden. We follow our ‘becoming-with’ the main character of the video and her digital embodiments as ‘self-in-control’, a ‘vulnerable’ body, a ‘technologically mediated body’, and the body of a ‘happy consumer’. From affect theory, we borrow the concept of ‘happy object’ as a method to engage the flow of performative ‘becoming-with’ ideas, values, and objects. Our contribution in theorizing the process of atmospheric attunement is noticing how the labour of attuning proceeds in iterations of sensing, becoming, and becoming-with.

A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them? This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past. Funding Agencies|European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programmeEuropean Research Council (ERC) [715950]

By applying a posthuman perspective to the analysis of care for older people (COP), we analyse the agential cuts (together/apart) enacted by humans (mainly caregivers and older people) and more-than-humans (a camera intra-acting with other objects) whose agential entanglement configures and reconfigures the political economy of the caring apparatus. Our study identifies 'targeting', 'monitoring', and 'aligning' as interrelated caring practices, thus contributing to advance a posthuman understanding of welfare technology, and advancing a critical use of the possibilities enacted by technologies.

In this paper, we elaborate on how the future older person is characterised and what future ageing entails in relation to welfare technologies highlighting which actors, social and material, affect ...

The relationship between democracy and design has been the topic of significant discussion in the design community. It is also at the core of participatory design that relies on the principle of genuine participation. According to this, users are not mere informants but legitimate participants in the design process. A great deal of participatory design, however, is driven by instrumental logics rather than participatory and democratic principles. In analysing these power relations, science and technology studies (STS) provides the starting point to introduce the concepts of ‘engineering an atmosphere’ (i.e. the process) and ‘engineered atmosphere’ (i.e. the outcome). These concepts problematise the principles and modes of participatory design, highlighting the tensions between economic and social agendas and top-down and bottom-up interactions. This problematic can be shown in the way that new teachnologies are targeted at older populations, necessitating an interrogation of the processes underpirnning the design and development of technological products and devices. It is important to reflect on who is included and who is excluded from technological design and innovation, which is always, and necessarily so, a fluid process.

Purpose Professional caregivers are asked to use various technological devices, which are expected to support them or even act in their place. From a theoretical perspective, care is more and more delegated to technologies1. Care practices are transformed by this relationship between humans and artifacts2. The purpose of the paper is to explore how the issues that emerge during the implementation of new technology are attended to by caregivers and what this means for developing care mediated by technology committed to older people’s quality of life. Method We study the process of introducing a camera for remote monitoring at night in older people’s houses (see figure 1) in a Swedish municipality by means of interviews and ethnographic observations. We analyze how this technology becomes part of care practices by following its implementation. Results In a previous paper3, we mobilized Latour’s concept of matter of concern4 for describing the need to foreground “complicated, engaging, diverse, fragile, and situated issues”3 (p 1) to be addressed, not concealed, when introducing technology for older people. With this paper, we advance the argument by following Puig de la Bellacasa in her move from matters of concern to matters of care. By focusing on the process of delegation of caring to the camera we show how it turned to be a matter of care for several caregivers as issues concerning its use emerged. The concept of care adds a stronger affective and ethical connotation5 (p 89) to the issues we focus on. It helps us to highlight that caregivers are not only affected by interacting with technologies at work. Caregivers are also strongly committed to ethically dealing with such issues in order to provide good care. We conclude by discussing how attending to matters of care can support developing care committed to enhancing older people’s quality of life. HV3D and Ivris

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe how organizational members became storywriters of an important process of organizational change. Writing became a practice designed to create a space, a time and a methodology with which to author the process of change and create a learning context. The written stories produced both the subjectivity of practical authors and reflexively created the con/text for their reproduction.Design/methodology/approachA storywriting workshop inspired by a processual and participatory practice-based approach to learning and knowing was held in a research organization undergoing privatization. For six months, 31 organizational members, divided into two groups, participated in writing one story per week for six weeks. The written story had to refer to a fact that had occurred in the previous week, thus prompting reflection on the ongoing organizational life and giving a situated meaning to the change process.FindingsStorywriting is first and foremost a social practice of wayfinding, that is of knowing as one goes. Writing proved to be an effective practice that involved the authors, their narratives and the audiences in a shared experience where all these practice elements became connected and through their connection acquired agency.Originality/valueNarrative knowledge has been studied mainly in storytelling, while storywriting by organizational members has received less attention. This paper explores storywriting both as a situated, relational and material practice and as the process that produces narratives which can be considered for their content and their style.

Author 1: They say they want to disturb the AcademicConferenceMachine.Author 34: What is anAcademicConferenceMachine?Author 2: Please do not go in that direction. Ask, for example, what does an AcademicConferenceMachine do?Author 51: Ok, so what does it do?Author 6: AcademicConferenceMachines are becoming so regulated and standardized that they might lose the possibility to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge differently.Author 227: Do you think they succeeded?Author 9999: I do not know.

Addressing evidence in health and welfare technology interventions from different perspectives

In this paper I will discuss some results of a research project aimed at studying the transformation of an important Research Centre of North Italy. Organizational actors have been involved as storytellers of this organizational change. They have reconstructed the trajectories of change, telling about the influence of change on their organizational relations and working experience. Using texts collected in the form of weekly diaries, I will discuss how the organizational remembering has taken place as practical accomplishment, and how it has enabled a reflexive process.

Design challenges refer to a difficulty of corresponding human and contextual complexity (i.e. needs, roles, and resources) in design practices. Such an issue calls for combining deep investigations with relevant design experiences. We propose a workshop for disentangling and discussing design practices by adopting the Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. These techniques allow enacting personal performances as well as the construction of a shared narrative about the participants' roles, needs, and resources. By this workshop, we aim to improve the participants' competence in understanding people's needs and developing a design solution accordingly. Finally, possible outcomes are: a special issue of an international peer reviewed journal, and/or a live performance that the conference attendees can enjoy as an experiential design occasion.

This paper grounds in a research experience for engaging older people as co-designers of several wearable and in-house technologies. We start by describing a case study that is a precommercial procurement aimed at developing innovative services for the welfare of citizens, with a focus on older people. We present and discuss the qualitative data gathered on the occasion of a bodystorming with two groups of participants. The analysis led to the identification of the "aesthetic appropriateness", the "social sensitivity", and the "gender awareness" as three different dimensions that affected the acceptability of the technological devices. This approach created the conditions for instantiating the subversive power of participation. At the same time, such a subversion proved the authenticity of the participatory process. By drawing on this project, the purpose of the paper is to further our understanding of the conditions for Participatory Design.

Characterized by the scarce presence of women, the Computer Science sector is based on a gendered organizational culture that risks reproducing inequality because of hegemonic masculinity and a gen...

In this chapter the mutual shaping of the technology and gender is analyzed in relation to the phenomenon of gender digital divide. The discussion starts with the re-construction of the theoretical background, shedding light on different analytical approaches to technological development. The gender blind perspective of mainstream technology studies is uncovered; looking at theoretical contributes of feminist and gender studies. This positioning is aimed to consider the cultural and material aspects involved in the digital gender gap. The chapter leads to a general conclusion: it is of utmost importance that researchers, decision-makers and professionals in Information Technology field take into account that all spheres inhabited by human beings are inevitably gendered. The gender mainstreaming approach may inform the construction of a gender-aware research agenda and the identification of the following transformative actions. The synergy among researchers, practitioners and decision-makers at political and business level is crucial for a gender-sensitive and sustainable development.

The development of information technologies is changing work and employment. Society now demands that the people must be able to use technology. While technological skills and familiarity with the computer are ever more crucial, from the gender perspective we observe a considerable divide between those who have frequent and 'friendly' access to electronic devices - above all men - and those who do not, generally women. This gender divide is caused by social, structural factors, and individual differences. It is important to understand how this gap can be closed and how feminine participation in Information Technology (IT) be improved. Telementoring or distance learning may be ad hoc solutions to these problems. The article explores how computer technology can be used to develop and sustain relationships between expert and novice women in the IT field by having them to share experimental narratives about their work.

In this paper, we present a close reading of work in ubicomp of applications for older people. Starting from three lines of enquiry defined in the inaugural issue of this journal, we discuss how ubicomp research has presented the relationship between technologies and older users. We base our reasoning on a review of papers published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (1997-2014). The lines of enquiry refer to paradigms (functional vs. sociotechnical), users (stereotype and involvement), and contexts (indoor and/or outdoor). These themes address the presentation of SUITCASE project (SUstainable Integrated & Territorial CAre SErvices). This is a two-year research on care services for older citizens within the smart home construct. We develop an initial framework that not only provides a cohesive view of technologies for older people, but also serves as a salient guideline for reflective design which extends beyond the target population. This framework may also address future design projects, funding schemes, and editorial policies. © 2017, The Author(s).