ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I direct attention to care workers’ active engagement in the process of making digital technologies work. In contrast to studies that portray care workers as either invisible or as non-skilled and ignorant of new technologies, I highlight the agency of care workers as they try to integrate technologies into the social and spatial arrangements of care. In doing so, I mobilise the figures of ‘repair’ and ‘bricolage’ to understand the various ways in which dementia care workers relate to and make use of technology in dementia care work. I argue that, while both repair and bricolage care work articulate the active role of the care workers, they differ in how the object of care is configured: whereas repair work is primarily oriented towards the care for dementia technologies, bricolage care work is oriented towards the conditions of care in situated and emergent situations, with no particular technology or outcome pre-defined as a solution. Hence, repair and bricolage care work diverge not only in the objects of care (technology versus the person with dementia) but also in the temporality of care (planned versus situated.
