Framing arguments through posthumanism and feminist technoscience, this paper departs from anthropocentrism to explore the evolving landscape of care for older adults. It considers the complex entanglements of human and more-than-human entities in a zeitgeist defined by fertility decline, longer life expectancy, and growing old alone. It articulates how the metaphor of the body as a machine is being complicated by the rise of datafication and assistive gerontechnology. These enduring human-technology encounters are rewriting intimacies beyond the imaginings of the corporeal and fleshy body, while piquing interest in techno-kins and digitized intimacies. This indicates that the episteme of family and kinship has permeated into the production of engineered artifacts, and that these artifacts represent cultural, semantic, and symbolic relevance. Interestingly, reliance on technologies in building and fostering new network ties, and drafting new kinship narratives are tied to the past desires and imaginations of doing family, renewal of values, renovation and enduring legacy through posterity. The ideation and conceptualization of appropriate succour continue to draw on the ontology of the biogenetic-cultural cosmos of kinship despite neo-kinship studies enunciating kinship as a social and cultural construct. Assistive, therapeutic, and anthropomorphic robots underpin the asymmetrical power dynamics of affective economies.

Authors:
Sayendri Panchadhyayi, RV University Bangalore, India

About the Presenter(s)
Sayendri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in RV University, India. She is an international Associate at the Centre for Care attached to the University of Sheffield and a mentor in the ASDS Early Career Researchers' Mentoring Scheme 2025-2026.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sayendri-panchadhyayi-phd-04209340/

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sayendri-Panchadhyayi

Additional website of interest
https://sites.google.com/d/1lIitCUn9QcPEKk1Ti6G4h26NHDv0vxpN/p/1N5eVmkNqBNzO_Amt-nX-HdACsZl_H3PC/edit?authuser=1

See this presentation on the full schedule – Thursday Schedule

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