VSJF Jahreskonferenz 2023 / VSJF Annual Conference 2023

Treffen der Fachgruppe Technik/
Meeting of the Technology Section
ABSTRACTS
Incentive Talk: Ethical and methodological dilemmas in social science interventions:
Careful engagements as composition of telecare services
Professor Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen
Faculty of Health and Social Science, University of South-Eastern Norway (USN)
I explore my own careful engagement in the appropriation of a telecare platform in aDanish
municipality in which the platform disturbed existing care relations among the careproviders. The platform raised questions such as how the health centers, the medical
practitioners and the local lung clinic should collaborate about monitoring chronically ill
old persons. To explore this, the care providers from different healthcare sectors werebrought together to discuss and enact new relations. While relying on ideas from carestudies and Science &amp; Technology Studies and to debate the difficulty of engaged
research in a divided professional field embracing various performance systems andideas of good care, I explore my own engagement as a particular kind of caring. While I
increasingly experienced the difficulties of holding everything together, I had to give up
the focus on cross-sector relations. The presentation contributes to and destabilizes thenotion of engaged research by pointing out the challenges facing a researcher who may
have to bring actors together that have not been collaborated before. Engaged research
may come with a price and sometimes, the researcher must make concessions toresearch collaborators to continue the research project.
Professional Women and Elder Care in Contemporary Japan: Anxiety and the Move
Toward Technocare
Anne Aronsson, Yale University
The elder population in Japan is increasing drastically, causing a number of issues thathave not yet been encountered by Western countries. Demographic data from Japanreveal that the Japanese have the longest lifespan globally, resulting in the country
having the world’s highest population of elderly people. At the same time, the country

has a rapidly declining birth rate. As the population is aging, the workforce is shrinking
and leaving a high number of elders with fewer caregivers to look after them. At present,
the Japanese government is working on the development of robotic care solutions toovercome the labor shortage in eldercare, implementing a new agenda to increasinglyintroduce social robots to assist in the field. This presentation discusses professional
women in Japan and their burden of caring for aging relatives, and how introducing
robotic care devices might reduce current anxieties regarding the provision of eldercare.
It analyzes the eldercare strategies of 12 white-collar professional women in their forties
and fifties, and examines the extent to which gendered, expected at-home caregiving
affects their professional commitments and associated anxieties. The findings areexpected to provide crucial insight into the most effective strategies that can be used byJapanese women to balance their careers with responsibilities to care for elderly
relatives, particularly when it is impossible to predict the intensity of caregiving in thefuture.

“Social” robots forming sociality? Analysis of relationality in long-term care practices
involving robots, a Japanese example
Yuko Tamaki Welply, EHESSThis presentation will offer preliminary findings from participant observation of the use
and non-use of a “social” robot (nonverbal communication robot) in a Japanese longterm care facility (LTCF). The previous presentation (from last year) focused on datafrom the robot provider side, and this presentation is a continuation of that, focusing ondata from the robot user side (care workers and LTCF residents). First, I will show
residents “using” social robots in the LTCF. Then, I will discuss the actual usage of therobot by care workers in different situations. Finally, these will be analysed in greater
depth in comparison to the “imagined” usage by the robot provider, in terms ofrelationality.

Analyzing the redistribution of work tasks between humans and robots in thedomain of care work. Cases from Germany and Japan
Kevin Wiggert, Technical University Berlin
Over the last twenty years, care robots are claimed to be a promising technology for
elderly care relieving care professionals in alleviating them from the heavy burden ofcare work. Numerous care robot projects have been financed by funding agencies,
conducted by robot developers, and supported by care professionals and organizations
with reference to this claim. In our empirical data, we found a recurring line of argument
for explaining and justifying the need for developing care robots to tackle this nursingcrisis. This argument remains consistent over time and across national contexts, itappears dominant in Germany and Japan alike Considering the increasing shortage ofstaff, care robots should be developed and deployed to help filling the gap. Therefore,
we investigate cases of developing and applying collaborative robots as co-workers ofhuman care professionals in Europe and Japan in our project. The basic idea ofcollaborative robotics aims to support human work tasks by delegating subtasks torobots. Accordingly, this circumstance does not result so much in the replacement ofentire jobs but rather leads to redistributions of agency within work tasks. Against thisbackground, this presentation shows some of the case studies about redistributing worktasks among humans and robots in the domain of care work in Germany and Japan,
while applying the methodical approach of analyzing distributed action. In addition, thistalk will specify potential similarities and differences between the German and theJapanese contexts.
Organisers:

Assoc. Prof. Susanne Brucksch
Teikyo University, JapanDr Cosima Wagner
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Supporter:

Assoc. Prof. Naonori KodateUniversity College Dublin, Ireland

Date:

November 03, 2023 (Fri)9:00 – 12:00 Berlin / 17:00 – 20:00 Tokyo
Online Meeting (VSJF Annual conference, JDZB Berlin)
Participation via login data will be provided after prior registration
via email: brucksch[at]teikyo-u.ac.jp (until November 02, 2023).

Venue:

This section meeting is kindly supported by:
UCD Centre for Japanese Studies
University College Dublin (UCD)
Ireland