International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW)

COVID and Care: dynamics of care in pandemic times. (Co-Care)

Co-Care analyzes the role of care in crises, such as the Covid pandemic. It intersects at the paradox of care with its overburdening, precariousness and invisibility on the one hand, and care’s importance for the preservation of social order on the other hand. The project’s overarching goal is to find new ways and means to make structures of care, care-givers and care-takers (more) visible and to strengthen them more sustainably. In the project, the IZEW takes on the project lead. Scientifically, it further undertakes conceptual and ethical analyses of the governance of the Covid-19 pandemic with regards to care in order to place values of different care dynamics in the social and political context of both, participation and justice.

Funding period

01.02.2023 – 31.01.2026

Grant number: 01UP2204A

IZEW-Team

Funding

Funding body: BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research)

project management: DLR - German Aerospace Centre

"The Covid pandemic's societal repercussions - research for integration, participation and innovation." as part of the framework „Understanding societies – shaping futures“.

Project Partners

Associated Partners

News

The article 'It's a dirty job' was published on December 12th in The Sociological Review. In it Ali Simon and Paula Villa Braslavsky shed light on how the lives and work of cleaners in Germany have changed during the hight of the COVID-19 pandemic.

From January 24 - 26, Katharina Krause took part in the workshop “Narrating Protection in IR: Questioning the (in)visibility of the inbetween” at the University of Uppsala. She presented a paper (written with Katharina Wezel) with the title “Protection for whom and from what? A care ethics approach to the role of protective clothing in pandemic times”.

At the panel discussion “Care work - how can we create a fair system for everyone?” at the “We Won't Shup Up!” festival on March 9th, Ali Simon and experts will discuss questions such as: How do we manage to overcome this system, or at least improve it? What solutions are there? And what could a utopia of care work look like?

Project

Care - both as a specific work performance, but also as an interpersonal relationship - was already a politically and socially problematic, often precarious, hardly visible and thus crisis-ridden area before the pandemic. During the pandemic, a "crisis within the crisis" emerged: the existing crisis of care within the crisis of the pandemic.

The Co-Care project starts from this "crisis within the crisis" and analyzes the tension between the overload, precariousness and invisibility on the one hand and the society-sustaining importance of care on the other hand. The overall goal is to find new ways and means to make care and the care-givers and care-receivers acting in these contexts visible and to strengthen them permanently. For this purpose, the significance, need and resources of care dynamics for a post-pandemic society - which may re-enter further crises - will be elaborated. Further, the empirical studies on professional cleaning and socio-pedagogical family assistance and ethical take-aways will be reified  . Co-Care thus addresses the urgent need for research that clarifies at which points of the pandemic were care arrangements destabilized, which needs but also resources can be discovered here, and how can care dynamics be strengthened for everyday life. The latter is key so that in anothercrisis, the fields of care can function not as a crisis in the crisis, but above all as a resource in the crisis.

Besides the Ethics Centre, research partners in Co-Care are the Department of Social Pedagogy at Tübingen University and the Department of Sociology at LMU.

Publications

  • Ajder, H., Patrini, G., Cavalli, F. & Cullen, L. (2019). The State of Deepfakes: Landscape, Threats, and Impact. Deeptrace.
  • Anderson, J., Rainie, L. & Luchsinger, A. (2018). Artificial intelligence and the future of humans. Pew Research Center.
  • Bohnstedt, J. (2019). Vom Personenbezug zum Gerätebezug – KI und Datenschutz. DSRITB, 409–421.
  • Brundage, M. et al. (2018). The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation. arXiv:1802.07228
  • Chesney, R. & Citron, D. (2019). Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security. California Law Review, 107, 1753–1819. https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38RV0D15J
  • Deutscher Bundestag (28. Oktober 2020). Bericht der Enquete-Kommission Künstliche Intelligenz – Gesellschaftliche Verantwortung und wirtschaftliche, soziale und ökologische Potenziale (Vorabfassung), Drucksache 19/23700. https://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/19/237/1923700.pdf
  • Diaz, A.‑C. (2. Oktober 2020). Parkland victim Joaqium Oliver comes back to life in heartbreaking plea to voters. AdAge, 2020. https://adage.com/article/advertising/parkland-victim-joaquin-oliver-comes-back-life-heartbreaking-plea-voters/2285166
  • Han-sol, P. (17. Januar 2021). Holographic performances of dead stars welcomed, with caution. The Korea Times. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2021/01/703_302548.html
  • Heesen, J. (2022). Verstorbene als Medienprodukt. Die Programmierung von Unendlichkeit als ethische Herausforderung. In W. George & K. Weber (Hg.), Die Grenzen des Wachstums: Eigene Endlichkeit. Gießen 2022 (im Druck).
  • Hennig, Martin (2018a), Fiktionen vom digitalen Körper, Leben und Tod in Literatur, Film und Computerspiel. In: Anja Hartung-Griemberg/Ralf Vollbrecht/ Christine Dallmann (Hg.): Körpergeschichten. Körper als Fluchtpunkte medialer Biografisierungspraxen. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 195-215.
  • Jordan, M. I. (2019). Artificial intelligence – The revolution hasn’t happened yet. Harvard Data Science Review, 1. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.f06c6e61
  • Kasket, E. (2020). All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data. London: Robinson.Kneese, T. (2. November 2020). How Data Can Create Full-On Apparitions of the Dead. Slate. https://slate.com/technology/2020/11/robert-kardashian-joaquin-oliver-deepfakes-death.html
  • Kubis, M., Naczinsky, M., Selzer, A., Sperlich, T.,Steiner, S. & Waldmann, U. (2019). Der digitale Nachlass – Eine Untersuchung aus rechtlicher und technischer Sicht. https://doi.org/10.24406/sit-n-572224
  • Kwok, A. O. J. & Koh, S. G. M. (2020). Deepfake: a social construction of technology perspective. Current Issues in Tourism, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2020.1738357
  • Lagerkvist, A. (2017). The Media End: Digital Afterlife Agencies and Techno-existential Closure. In A. Hoskin (ed.), Digital Memory Studies. Media Pasts in Transition (p. 48-84). New York: Routledge.
  • Loh, J. (2020). Trans- und Posthumanismus zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 3. korrigierte Auflage.
  • Marshall, A., Rojas, R., Stokes, J. & Brinkman, D. (2018). Securing the Future of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Microsoft. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security/engineering/securing-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning
  • McEvoy, F. J. (23. Januar 2021). Deepfaking the Deceased: Is it Ever Okay? You the Data. https://youthedata.com/2021/01/23/deepfaking-the-deceased-is-it-ever-okay/
  • Morse, T. & Birnhack, M. D. (2019). Digital Remains: The Users’ Perspectives. SSRN Electronic Journal. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3397533
  • Netzwerk Datenschutzexpertise. (2016). Postmortaler Datenschutz Auskunftsansprüche von Erben und Angehörigen zu personenbezogenen Internetdaten eines Verstorbenen. https://www.netzwerk-datenschutzexpertise.de/sites/default/files/gut_2016_08_postmortds.pdf
  • Öhman, C. & Watson, D. (2019). Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online. In Big Data & Society, January – June 2019, 1-13. 10.1177/2053951719842540
  • Öhman, C. & Floridi, L. (2018). An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 318–320. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0335-2
  • Rothco (2018). JFK Unsilenced. https://rothco.ie/work/jfk-unsilenced/
  • Savin-Baden, M. & Mason-Robbie, V. (eds.). (2020). Digital Afterlife. Death Matters in a Digital Age. Taylor & Francis.
  • Schindler, S. (2019). Künstliche Intelligenz und (Datenschutz-)Recht. ZD-Aktuell, 06647.
  • Sisto, D. (2020). Online Afterlives. Immortality, Memory, and Grief in Digital Culture. Translated by B. McClellan-Broussard. MIT Press.
  • Schmidt, J.-H. & Taddicken, M. (2017). Soziale Medien: Funktionen, Praktiken, Formationen. In J.-H. Schmidt & M. Taddicken (Hrsg.), Handbuch Soziale Medien (S. 23-37). Wiesbaden: Springer.
  • Smith, M. (2021). The Intangible Ossuaries: The Ethical Dilemmas that Come with Handling the Data of the Deceased. APPE Conference.
  • Spies, U. (2020). Klinische Krebsregistrierung aus Sicht der Tumorzentren und postmortaler Datenschutz. NZS, 921–926.
  • Topol, E. J. (2019). High-performance medicine: the convergence of human and artificial intelligence. Nature Medicine, 44, 44–56. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0300-7
  • Voinea, C. & Uszkai, R. (2019). An ethical framework for digital afterlife industries. In Proceedings of the 13th International Management Conference „Management Strategies for High Performance” 31st October – 1st November 2019, Bucharest, Romania. conferinta.management.ase.ro/archives/2019/pdf/5_20.pdf (20.12.2021).
  • Weissman, J. (2021). The Crowdsourced Panopticon. Conformity and Control on Social Media. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Wieder, C. (2018). Datenschutzrechtliche Betroffenenrechte bei der Verarbeitung von personenbezogenen Daten mittels künstlicher Intelligenz, Datenschutzrechtliche Betroffenenrechte bei der Verarbeitung von personenbezogenen Daten mittels künstlicher Intelligenz, in: Taeger, J. (Hrsg.). Rechtsfragen digitaler Transformationen. Edewecht, 505–518.
  • Yampolskiy, R. V. (2019). Unexplainability and Incomprehensibility of Artificial Intelligence. University of Louisville. arXiv:1907.03869

Project Progression

December 2023

Co-Care will participate with two talks at the efas conference at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences on December 1st: Katharina Krause will give a presentation on “Care in the pandemic - an Ethics of Care perspective on health security"; Ali Simon and Sabrina Mannebach will present on "Care, Corona & Transformation - (cleaning) practice in the crisis".

November 2023

On 16 and 17 November, Paula Villa, Mirjam Seits and Katharina Wezel will represent the Co-Care project at the official kick-off event of the BMBF funding line "Social Impacts of the Corona Pandemic". The event is hosted by the project management agency DLR and will take place in Bonn.

Ali Simon will present a poster titled "Clean Homes. An Intersectional Analysis of Housing, Cleaning and Care" at the conference "Housing Caring Land. Housing through Gender Studies", which will take place from 23-25 November in Brussels. See poster: PDF.

September 2023

  • The first theory-based results of Co-Care are now available, auhtored by Katharina Wezel und Katharina Krause: Follow Link.

July 2023

  • The Co-Care consortium met for two days in early July for an intensive and constructive exchange in a theory workshop at the University of Tübingen with the aim of an interdisciplinary synthesis of the concept of care in the pandemic context.
     
  • In the July issue of the journal NDV, Nachrichtendienst des Deutschen Vereins für öffentliche und private Fürsorge e.V., an associated partner of Co-Care, the first article of the research network was published. The article can be read here.

March 2023

The joint project kick-off took place at Hohentübingen Castle on March 6 and 7. In addition to the project consortium, the associated project partners also joined the event.