Paper short abstract:

This paper attends to digital “participatory” HPV vaccination campaigns as realizations of “care-full” county council communication policies. I discuss Facebook and app devices, experts and publics as assembling care collectives that enable and trouble policy visions of care.

Paper long abstract:

Devices enable and distribute care, but they can also participate in troubling and unsettling care. In attending to HPV vaccination campaigns as realizations of county council communication policies in Sweden, in this paper I draw upon my PhD thesis (Lindén 2016) to discuss two digital media communication initiatives as assembling care collectives of digital devices, experts and publics. In the county council communication policies, smartphone apps and social media are embraced as devices that allow for public engagement, care accessibility and "target group" adjusted communication. Accordingly, digital media is promised to enable "good care", and, what could be described as, "care-full" policies. By relating to recent feminist STS work on care (e.g. Martin et al. 2015), I discuss what is cared for in, and through, this promise of digital media as enabling "good care", what, and who, is neglected, and what trouble this generates.

I draw upon communication on a HPV vaccination campaign Facebook site, a "HPV app" campaign (incl. responses from users), and interviews with county council professionals working with these two campaigns. Based in this, I discuss how devices, experts and different publics, simultaneously, enable and trouble county council (policy) visions of care. In doing so, I define Facebook devices (i.e. social buttons) and the HPV app as "care enablers" (Eidenskog 2015) that participate in realizing "care-full" policies. I also discuss them as "care troublers" that help disturbing and unsettle such visions of care, and that enact alternative versions of what "good care" is.