Amy, a 27-year-old software developer, has struggled with disordered eating since she was a teenager. “But after learning to code, I got much better,” she said in a research interview. “I often code for ten or more hours without stopping.” Her psychiatrist, however, worried that Amy has replaced one compulsive behaviour with another. “Digital addiction” is often used to describe our relationship with smartphones, social media and other digital technologies. This way of thinki

The Leiden University newsletter published piece on my Veni research which I have recently started with: "From toy cats that purr to robot dogs that bark: what do such technologies mean for older people, healthcare providers and family members? A Dutch Research Council (NWO) Veni grant is enabling anthropologist Tanja Ahlin to investigate how animal-shaped robots can contribute to care for older people in the Netherlands." Read more here.

When I first introduced the notion of “field events” with my co-author Fangfang Li (Ahlin and Li 2019), digital technologies were becoming more common in ethnographic fieldwork, but they were still not the most popular. Only one year after the initial publication, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic forced ethnographers around the world to incorporate these devices into their methodology as funding agencies required the suspension of face-to-face fieldwork (Cabalquinto and Ahl