CARING TECHNOLOGIES & MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS
Day 1: Caring Technologies Seminar, June 9
Keynotes by Professor Jeannette Pols (University of Amsterdam, NL) and
Professor Ian Tucker (University of East London, UK)
Day 1: The seminar will take place in the Virta Building, Auditorium 109, at Tampere University (Åkerlundinkatu 5), and will also be available via LIVESTREAM.
Programme on Tuesday June 9, 2026
10.00-10.15 Welcome
10.15-11.45 Opening words: Professor Mianna Meskus (Tampere University)
& Dr Marjo Kolehmainen (University of Turku)
Keynote by Professor Jeannette Pols (University of Amsterdam, NL):
How Technologies Improve Our World – Or Not: Forms of the Good in Ethnographic Studies of Technology
Chair: Marjo Kolehmainen
11.45-13.00 Lunch
Session 1 (Chair: Tuuli Innola)
13.00-13.35 Taina Meriluoto (University of Helsinki) & Suvi Salmenniemi (University of Turku)
Radical Self-Care and Contradictions of Capitalism: Insights from Instagram
13.35-14.10 Daria Kosinova (University of Turku)
‘There Is No One Magic Touch’: Affective Atmospheres of Digital Mental Health Care Among People with Migrant and Ethnic Minority Backgrounds Living in Finland
14.10-14.45 Mari Lehto (University of Turku)
Networked Neurodivergence: Unruly Intensities of Digital ADHD Life
14.45-15.00 Break
Session 2 (Chair: Shahnaj Begum)
15.00-15.35 Essi Holopainen (University of Helsinki) & Meri Kulmala (University of Helsinki)
Digital Wellbeing of Young People: Mental Health Peer Support on Social Media
15.35-16.10 Marjo Kolehmainen (University of Turku)
Haunting Data: Mental Health, Data-Hacking and Digital Temporalities
16.10-16.30 Break
16.30-17.45
Keynote by Professor Ian Tucker (University of East London, UK):
Algorithmic Atmospheres and Digital Infrastructures of Care: Reconfiguring Mental Health in Digital Cultures
Chair: Mianna Meskus
19 Dinner: Restaurant Näsinneula, Laiturikatu 1
Day 2: Mental Health Matters Workshop, June 10
Keynote by Dr Jacinthe Flore (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Day 2: The workshop will take place in the Linna Building, Room 5026, at Tampere University (Kalevantie 5). The keynote talk will be a webinar with a screening in Linna 5026 and accessible online via Zoom.
Programme on Wednesday June 10, 2026
09.00-09.15 Morning coffee and opening words
Session 1 (Chair: Tuuli Innola)
09.15-11.20 Session 1
11:20-11.30 Break
11.30-12.45
Keynote by Dr Jacinthe Flore (University of Melbourne, Australia):
Mental Health Beyond the Mind: Technologies of the ‘Total Body’
Chairs: Tuuli Innola & Jarkko Salminen
12.45-13.30 Lunch
Session 2 (Chair: Marjo Kolehmainen)
13.30-15.10 Session 2
15.10-15.20 Break
Session 3 (Chair: Daria Kosinova)
15.20-17.00 Session 3
17.00-17.10 Break
Session 4 (Chair: Jarkko Salminen)
17.10-18.25 Session 4
18.30- After-work event (with an option for dining)
The seminar is jointly organized by the Research Council of Finland funded project Networked Care: Intimate Matters in Online Mental Health Support at the University of Turku (PI: Marjo Kolehmainen) and TaSTI – Tampere Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Tampere (Director: Mianna Meskus).
Contact person: Tuuli Innola (tuuli.innola@utu.fi)
KEYNOTES:
Professor Jeannette Pols (University of Amsterdam, NL):
How Technologies Improve Our World – Or Not: Forms of the Good in Ethnographic Studies of Technology
Technologies can be a wide variety of things, and in this lecture I suggest it is helpful to study technologies as actors (or actant) with which people engage in relationships (or not!) and that change the way people do things and relate to one another. How technologies shape relationships can be learned by empirically analysing the problems they are made to solve, the values they are intended to bring about, and the values they actually bring about. Rarely, I argue, these values are the aspired for economic values such as efficiency, nor the utilitarian values of effectivity. While such values are important at a policy level, ethnographic analysis on what happens when people actually use technologies, shows different types of values. Apart from certain moral values, these are often aesthetic values. Aesthetic values refer to cultural ideas of what is important and appropriate to do. Aesthetic values are not theorized much in academia, but they have a clear place in our everyday lives, where we speak of, say, a great goal, a beautiful death, or a friendly nurse. The lense of aesthetic values in everyday life, I will argue, can help us to make sense of what technologies (and, for that matter, processes of digitalization) do and how we may evaluate this. I will illustrate these claims with examples from my ethnographic research into caring communities, by comparing information and communication technologies, and the need for high and low tech interventions in elder care. Rather than a narrow definition of a ‘healthy life’, we need a broader definition of ‘a good life’ that includes meaningful relationships and mental health.
BIO:
Jeannette Pols is Professor Anthropology of Everyday Ethics at the department of Anthropology, Faculty of Behavioral & Social Sciences, and the department of Ethics, Law & Humanities of the Amsterdam Medical Center, University of Amsterdam. The chair is established between the faculties. Pols is a founding researcher of care studies, a field that bridges the anthropology of care and STS studies using a material semiotic approach. The mission of Pols’ chair is to build bridges between research in medical ethics and the anthropology of care. Her research and teaching develop the ethnographic study of values in everyday life and care, with a particular focus on aesthetic values, practices and qualifications. A first study was on understanding ‘dignity’as an aesthetic value. She wrote a book on (the historiy of the idea of) everyday aesthetics and their importance for understanding culture (with a small c), and the repertoires of ‘being human’ that follow from these practices. Pols is a founding member of the international Care Practices Research Network Care Practices Research Network. She initiated and organizes the ‘Festival of Unexpected Subjects’, and this years edition takes place June 25 in Het Zonnehuis in Amsterdam.
Professor Ian Tucker (University of East London, UK):
Algorithmic Atmospheres and Digital Infrastructures of Care: Reconfiguring Mental Health in Digital Cultures
The use of technologies for emotional support is not new. People have sought comfort from material objects for a long time. However, in recent years, a significant increase in the development of technologies designed to provide support for our emotional and mental health has occurred. From mindfulness apps and AI companions to online peer-support platforms, digital tools do not simply deliver support but actively configure the conditions under which support is felt, practiced and narrated. This talk brings together recent research on digital infrastructures to examine how algorithmic systems reshape relations between emotion, agency and support.
Drawing on qualitative studies of mental health app users, AI companion interactions, and online mental health communities, I explore how individuals engage in practices of atmospheric attunement – learning to sense, curate, and recalibrate their environments and affective states in relation to digital systems. Across these contexts, mental health support emerges not as a discrete intervention but as an ongoing, situated labour distributed across bodies, devices and spaces. At the same time, algorithmic agency plays a decisive role in structuring these experiences: from gamified self-tracking to affective check-ins, to the reconfiguration of intimacy and attachment in human-AI relationships, to the shaping and communicative norms and narratives within platformed communities.
In the talk I want to highlight three key dynamics. First, digital infrastructures cultivate ambivalent affects, simultaneously offering comfort, connection, and accessibility while generating pressure, dependency, and feelings of insufficiency. Second, they render care increasingly contingent on opaque and shifting algorithmic processes, making experiences of support vulnerable to disruption, loss, and disillusionment. Third, they embed and materialise broader socio-political logics – particularly neoliberal ideals of self-optimisation, scalability, and personal responsibility – within everyday practices of coping and care.
Rather than evaluating whether digital systems are better or worse than traditional forms of support, this talk reframes the question by asking how they reconfigure what it means to feel supported, to be known, and to manage mental health in contemporary digital cultures. In doing so, it foregrounds the need to critically engage with the design, governance, and cultural implications of algorithmic care infrastructures as they become increasingly embedded in everyday life.
BIO:
Ian is Professor of Health and Social Psychology at The University of East London. His research focuses on mental health, emotion, and affect, with particular emphasis on the ways these are shaped through interactions with digital technologies. He has published empirical and theoretical work on care and recovery in a range of environments for mental health support, digital health and the emerging role of artificial intelligence in emotional and psychological life. Ian is currently working on a project exploring the use of digital platforms in relation to the design and delivery of social prescribing. Ian is co-author of Social Psychology of Emotion (Sage), Emotion in the Digital Age (Routledge’s Studies in Science, Technology & Society Series) and Understanding Mental Health Apps: An Applied Psychosocial Perspective (Palgrave Studies in Cyberpsychology). He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Emotion, Space and Society.
Dr Jacinthe Flore (University of Melbourne, Australia):
Mental Health Beyond the Mind: Technologies of the ‘Total Body’
Mental health is increasingly understood and managed through emerging technologies in the twenty-first century. ‘Digital mental health’ encompasses the creation of wearables, sensors and applications to track moods and emotions, mine electrodermal activity, and monitor the body in its totality. In this frame, it is not enough to consider mental health as a matter for the brain and / or the mind. The body and its minute datafication are harnessed to provide an apparently more holistic picture of mental health. Further, developers of digital mental health increasingly offer additional features such as wellness advice and chatbots powered by artificial intelligence providing a comprehensive wellness resource to the user. Wearables used for mental health are now technologies of the total body – a body that can be atomised and tracked in depth. This paper will explore the historical underpinnings of knowledge of mental health deployed by these technologies, and it will examine the implications of the turn of digital mental health to the total body.
BIO:
Dr Jacinthe Flore is the Director of the Medical Humanities Research Lab and a Senior Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research combines methods from history, science and technology studies, and medical humanities. Jacinthe is the author of The Artefacts of Digital Mental Health (Palgrave 2023) and A Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Sciences (Palgrave 2020).