Dwelling the Telecare Home: Place, Location and Habitability

Abstract

Home has become a newly fostered place for care giving in what might be called an aging in place paradigm. As a result, thinking about how the home's spatialities are configured and how they might transform caring has become an important issue for the social sciences. This article is a contribution to this line of thought and looks at being-at-home from a non-anthropocentric point of view. By focusing on the telecare cases of an ongoing ethnographic project and drawing on Heideggerian insights on dwelling and place, we coin the term habitality. We think this term is useful for two purposes: (1) to think about the home as a materially heterogeneous set of spatialities and subjectivities and (2) to understand being-at-home not as a way of living in an enclosed and protected shelter of routine activities, but as a way of combining those spatialities and subjectivities and the differences (and oddities) they might bring.