Imagining Caring Futures for Frontline Health Work

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have long studied how technology can support collaborative care work in clinical and informal settings. We draw attention to the broader social, political, and economic conditions within which such care work and technologies for caring are embedded. The COVID-19 pandemic has made visible the exploitation of care and care workers that technology can be complicit in enabling, as well as the frequently gendered and racialized nature of care work. Our paper offers an analysis of an emerging digital ecosystem in frontline health work during the COVID-19 pandemic where these dynamics become highly visible. We conducted interviews with women frontline health workers in Haryana (India) to investigate their experiences with the digitization of various aspects of their work such as data collection, coordination, training, and financial compensation. We describe the top-down transition to technology-mediated workflows, the social organization of care, and the labor politics surrounding digital workflows. We then identify four interconnected ways in which health workers attempted to build more caring futures for themselves and their communities, by focusing on survival, resilience, advocacy, and resistance. Finally, we offer these as care orientations that CSCW and HCI researchers may adopt to critically reflect on and direct technology design towards enabling more caring futures for care workers and communities.