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Vibrant Screens: Remote therapy and counselling through the lens of digital materiality

Author(s): Marjo Kolehmainen

Thursday 15  |   9:40-10:00

Room: TP51

Session: Care and technologies in a digitalised society

This presentation draws upon an article analyzing the digital screen as a health technology, published in Health (Kolehmainen 2024). In the article, I ask how screens as a part of therapy settings or counselling practices materialise – or fail to materialise – care. The empirical data comprise interviews with therapy and counselling professionals, whose experiences with technology during the COVID-19 pandemic were my original interest. Adopting a sociomaterial approach to technology use, I scrutinise not only how screens are used, but also how screens themselves act and operate. This approach foregrounds the screen as ‘multiple’, complicating a dichotomous understanding between in-person therapy and remote therapy. In this presentation, I argue that the screen operates in a variety of ways that might either facilitate or degrade care and is an essential part of more-than-human care in digitalised societies. Acknowledging the agential capacities of all matter, I also conceptualise screens as ‘vibrant matter’.