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Tactical care infrastructuring: an ethnography on care workers’ mundane digital practices in formal care
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DOI：10.1093/jcmc/zmag015.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
While digital care technologies are often associated with specialized innovations such as telecare, telemedicine, and (AI-driven) care robotics, less attention has been paid to the role of mundane digital technologies in formal care settings, particularly in the Global South. Drawing on a 2-year ethnography of direct care workers (DCWs) in Shanghai, this study examines workers’ everyday engagement with non-specialized digital media in commodified elder care practices. This study develops the concept of “tactical care infrastructuring” to conceptualize a processual socio-technical assemblage in which mundane digital practices, commodified care arrangements, and workers’ structurally constrained social positions are dynamically intertwined. Although not originally designed as specialized care technologies, mundane digital technologies become functional care tools when embedded in frontline caregiving practices, as commodified care regimes are operationalized through workers’ ongoing digital engagement in everyday care work. By conceptualizing these digital practices as infrastructuring labor, “tactical care infrastructuring” is articulated through two interrelated processes. First, workers translate specialized care training into workable caregiving routines and facilitate credential attainment, thereby enacting institutional specialization. Second, responsive digital coordination and improvisational tinkering help sustain the continuous provision of everyday care. Such practices may appear as expressions of tactical agency, as workers navigate precarity associated with their gender, age, class, and rural migrant background and also redefine the viability of frontline care. However, they also stabilize care regimes that shift implicit physical, temporal, relational, and situational care burdens onto individual workers while rendering such labor invisible by framing these burdens as matters of personal or professional responsibility.
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