Books
How do digital technologies shape how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? This is a particularly pertinent question today, as technological innovation is on the rise while increasing migration is introducing vast distances among family members.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, Calling Family explores how families tinker with smartphones and social media to establish what care at a distance could be and how it should be done to be considered good
Through the notion of transnational care collectives, this book uncovers the subtle workings of digital technologies on care across countries and continents when being physically together is not feasible.
Learn more about the project.
Calling Family was published in August 2023, Rutgers University Press.
AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS NOW!
You can downdload the book for free from the RUP website.
BOOK REVIEWS
"Caring is commonly an exercise in sensitive listening and empathic understanding, with particular attention to all that is not said. This book shows how a scholar can manifest care through their research, and thereby appreciate how carers enact care in their daily lives and their creative deployment of digital technologies in facilitating transnational care."
- Daniel Miller, coeditor of The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology
"Calling Family innovatively combines the STS theoretical lens with anthropological sensitivity for social context. Through heartfelt storytelling, the reader is transported from the gardens of Kerala to the deserts of Oman, or takes a car ride across London via webcam. The author teases out the intricate influences of technologies on care and highlights the role of affect for transnational care collectives – the global assemblages of people and digital technologies through which families care at a distance."
- Loretta Baldassar, coauthor of Families Caring Across Borders: Migrating, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving
"Written with great empathy, Calling Family is an extremely timely and original book that explores how everyday digital technologies have become essential for caring relations across distance and how eldercare within such transnational care collectives is transformed."
- Monika Palmberger, coeditor of Care across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration
"Ahlin’s detailed, richly descriptive, often-humorous, always-touching vignettes ably and memorably illustrate important theoretical points. The book will spark lively conversations in an undergraduate classroom and fruitfully engage graduate students and academics interested in South Asia, science and technology studies, medical anthropology, gerontology, migration, digital ethnography, and the anthropology of aging."
- Michele Gamburd, Portland State University, book review in Anthropology & Aging
Book chapters
2023 Ahlin, Tanja. Care at a Distance: Digital Technologies and Ageing in Transnational Families.
2020 Ahlin, Tanja. Eldercare at a Distance: On Remittances and Everyday Information
and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in
Indian Transnational Families.
2022 Ahlin Tanja. The unseen care work of nurses from Kerala.
2021 Cabalquinto, Earvin Charles, and Tanja Ahlin.
Care within or out of reach: fantasies of care and connectivity in the time
of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2018 Ahlin, Tanja.
Intergenerational reciprocity in Indian transnational families.
2016 Ahlin, Tanja.
E-care in Kerala.
Peer-reviewed articles
2024 Ahlin, Tanja, and Anna Mann. Ambiguous Animals, Ambivalent Carers and Arbitrary Care Collectives:
Re-theorizing Resistance to Social Robots in Healthcare. Social Science and Medicine.
2024 Ahlin, Tanja, Kasturi Sen and Jeannette Pols. Telecare that Works: Lessons on Integrating Digital Technologies in Elder Care from Indian Transnational Families. Anthropology and Medicine 1-16.
2024 Van Voorst, Roanne, and Tanja Ahlin. Key points for an ethnography of AI: an approach towards crucial data. Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11, 337.
2023 Cabalquinto, Earvin, and Tanja Ahlin. Researching (im)mobile lives during a lockdown:
Reconceptualising remote interviews as a field events. International Journal of Cultural Studies 26(6).
2023 Ahlin, Tanja, and Anja Hiddinga. Technological socialities: How communication technologies shape
belonging among deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Sociology Compass e13068: 1-16.
2020 Ahlin, Tanja, and Kasturi Sen. Shifting duties: Enacting 'good daughters' through elder care
practices in transnational families from Kerala, South India. Gender, Place and Culture 27(10): 1395-1414.
2019 Ahlin, Tanja, and Fangfang Li. From Field Sites to Field Events: Creating the Field with
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Medicine, Anthropology, Theory 6(2): 1-24.
2018 Ahlin, Tanja. Frequent Callers: “Good Care” with ICTs in Indian Transnational Families. Medical
Anthropology 39(1): 69-82. See video abstract.
2018 Ahlin, Tanja. What keeps Maya from eating? A case study of disordered eating from North
India. Transcultural Psychiatry 55(4): 551-571.
2018 Ahlin, Tanja. Only Near Is Dear? Doing Elderly Care with Everyday ICTs in Indian Transnational
Families. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 32(1): 85-102.
2016 Ahlin, Tanja, Mark Nichter and Gopukrishnan Pillai. Health insurance in India: What do we know
and why is ethnographic research needed. Anthropology & Medicine 23(1): 102-124.
2015 Manderson, Lenore, Mark Davis, Chip Colwell and Tanja Ahlin. On Secrecy, Disclosure, the Public,
and the Private in Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 12. Current Anthropology 56(Supplement 12): S183-S190.
2013 Ahlin, Tanja. Prehajanje praks zdravljenja in z zdravjem povezanih konceptov med kulturami in
kontinenti: Joga v Evropi, anoreksija v Aziji (The Travelling of Healing Practices and Health-Related Concepts across Cultures and Continents: Yoga in Europe, Anorexia in Asia). Glasnik SED 53(1-2): 25-31.
2012 Ahlin, Tanja. Of Food and Friendship: The Methods to Understanding Eating Disorders in India.
Medisch Anthropologie 24(1): 41-56.
2011 Ahlin, Tanja. Technology and Cultural (R)evolution: Can Telemedicine Give Power to the Patients?
Curare 34(3): 165-172.
Translations (selection)
2015 Mary Oliver: Zakaj se zbujam zgodaj (Why I Wake Up Early). Nova lirika. Ljubljana: Mladinska založba.
2011 Carr, Nicholas: Plitvine: Kako internet vpliva na naše možgane (The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains). Ljubljana, Cankarjeva založba.
2009 Anderson, Chris: Dolgi rep (The Long Tail). Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba.
2011 Armbrecht, Ann: Ožine: Romanje domov (Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home). Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba.
2009 Drolma, Ani Choying: Moj glas za svobodo (My voix pour la liberté), in collaboration with Katarina Draškovič. Tržič: Učila International.
