Who Cares for the Future? Digital Technologies, People and Health in Saxony-Anhalt

My current research is concerned with the programs, goals, and effects of digitalization as development aimed at both transforming medical and geriatric care infrastructures in Saxony-Anhalt’s countryside and improving the region’s economic situation. Since Germany’s reunification, the region and its inhabitants have experienced the rise and fall of diverse future imaginaries, most notably due to the closure of coal mines and the collapse of the GDR. Earlier, these imaginaries promised progress, growth, and other improvements in life, but more recently, the region is associated with demographic decline, a weak economy, and growing right-wing sentiments. Together with colleagues from the “Medical Anthropology and Digital Transformation Lab” (MADT-Lab), and based on ethnographic fieldwork, my work will examine how different actors in the region (from patients to project managers) engage with these issues and what futures are at stake. Furthermore, I am interested in the conceptions of health and aging, care relations and autonomy, and the human in relation to the digital technologies that undergird the multiple understandings and subsequent strategies of my interlocutors.