Securizing care: Networks, Immediacy and Independence in a Home Telecare Service

Abstract

This thesis comes from an ethnography conducted in a Home Telecare Service and it is mainly concerned with how remote and immediate care is organized, how independence is embodied and enacted by the use, misuse or non use of the service and how the users' homes and the practices of dwelling are shaped by the incorporation of the service.  The main aim of these empirical questions is to explore what kind of deinstitutionalization process is being configured through telecare. Specifically, the main statement I would like to put forward is that deinstitutionalization can be understood, according to the telecare case study, as the shift from a disciplining care regime to a securitizing care regime.