Moving Beyond Clinical Imaginaries: Technogeographies of the Everyday Urban

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we analyse the intersections between care and place in mundane spaces not explicitly designed for the provision of care, and where digital technologies are used to mediate ecologies of distress in the city. We locate our analysis alongside studies of how digital technologies impact the experience of care within non-clinical spaces, whilst noting that much research on the use of technologies for care remains haunted by clinical imaginaries. Bringing together ideas of multi-sited therapeutic assemblages, technogeographies of care, and how places-by-proxy can act as conduits for care, we explore an example of an online app being used in public space to manage experiences of anxiety in an everyday urban environment. We reflect on this illustrative example to trace the movement of care as it is mediated through digital technologies—out of the clinic, beyond the home, and into the ordinary spaces of the city. We conclude that the entanglements of digital technologies and ordinary urban places prompt us to entirely reconsider questions of the where of care.