Presentation
Title of the thesis: Studying care and monitoring objects in the context of ageing at home.
Under the supervision of Cornelia Hummel (IRS, Université de Genève) and Madeleine Akrich (CSI, Mines Paris – PSL).
My research interests focus on the ageing process, with particular attention paid to the way home, and objects are involved. My PhD is part of a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation entitled “Ageing Humans, Changing Homes”, designed to study, from the perspective of Science and Technology Studies, the reconfiguration of home when “aging” socio-technical objects are brought in.
The aim of my thesis is to gain a better understanding of how objects provide support for home care and monitoring during the ageing process, while at the same time confronting them with the notion of autonomy. My initial focus was on the remote alarm and the weekly pill organizer, two assistive devices that mark the daily lives and routines of older people. Remote alarms and weekly diaries are technical devices that bring together different actors, whether physically present in the home or not, in different spaces and at different times. They perform the role of a coordinating device, described by Akrich (1993) as a device that connects disjoint universes while maintaining firm boundaries between them. Questioning the involvement of non-human entities in the production of age and ageing allows to put into perspective the responsibility we place on the elderly to achieve a controlled, postponed and successful old age.
Publications
Aline Bœuf is the author of Briser le tabou des règles [Breaking the taboo of menstruation], a book published in September 2023 by EPFL Press – Éditions 41, based on research carried out on menstruation in the professional world as part of a Master’s degree at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Neuchâtel (UniNE).