Infrastructuring ageing: Theorizing non-human agency in ageing and technology studies

Abstract

Scholars of ageing and technology are becoming increasingly interested in how technology and ageing can be seen as mutually constitutive, an in­terest that is beginning to form new research agendas, alliances and fields of their own. Different concepts have been used to theorise and analyse this relationship of mutual construction. This article explores a concept from Science and technology studies, which has not previously been put in direct relation to ageing, namely the concept of infrastructure. It pro­poses the notion of “infrastructuring ageing” as a theoretical-analytical approach for studying the mutual constitution of ageing and technol­ogy. This approach implies slightly new versions of, or attentions to, the non-human actor, agency and socio-technical transformation, and opens up to fresh ethnographic views on the social, material and techno-political transformations of ageing.

Keywords

• ageing
• gerotechnology
• infrastructuring
• non-human agency
• STS