Feeling at home with technologies?: an analysis of the impact of (assistive) technologies for the elderly and disabled people

This project wants to explore and analyse the social and cultural impact of assistive technologies for elderly and disabled people who need to remain at home. The aim to this coordinated action is trying to compare the two differen works that both Spanish and German groups are carrying out from their two respecctive fields, Social Psychology and Sociology, in these countries. In this way, the joint work and shared researching experience could allow us to extend and improve our conceptual tools as well as the methodological techniques and other investigarion's skills. Specifically, we are both interested in analysing how becoming-home-practices and the use of technologies re-configures people identify and feeling at home. And also which new social and cultural dynamics arise from the introduction of these assistive instruments: from nw ways of soial control and surveillance to some forms of resistance or even acceptance by users. This means that some kind of social impact and effects on everyday life will emerge, such as the demand of any kind of mobility of these elderly and disabled people (like leaving home) or some blurring of boundaries of home. Definitively, there are a lot of different practices enancting a rather contingent and ambiguous becoming-home that re-assembles humanness, that is bodies, emotions, technologies and spaces in highly affective and complex ways