Health Care at the Limits: Digitalisation, Vulnerability and Professional Practice In Turbulent Times

Contemporary healthcare is increasingly required to extend access, anticipate risks, coordinate complex trajectories and respond to vulnerability under conditions of scarcity, ageing, chronic illness and heavy institutional demands. Digital technologies are often presented as the obvious, not always questioned, solution to this (im)possible mandate. Telemedicine, remote monitoring, platforms, electronic records and AI-supported tools promise accuracy, continuity, efficiency, prediction and control over health processes. Yet, their sociological significance lies less in what they claim to optimise than in what they reveal, redistribute and unsettle.

This session invites sociological contributions examining digital health care at its limits: the points at which technological mediation encounters illness, dependency, dying, uncertainty, professional judgement, family involvement and organisational constraint. These limits are not merely failures of implementation. They are practical and moral boundaries where questions of presence, responsibility, trust, discretion and care become visible.

We welcome papers analysing how digital technologies are introduced, interpreted, resisted, repaired, appropriated or bypassed in concrete settings of care. Possible discussion topics include telemedicine, AI in healthcare, remote monitoring, digital infrastructures, professional practice, patient-professional interaction, chronic illness, ageing, end-of-life and palliative care, family care, care coordination and organisational routines.

The session focuses on empirical, theoretical or comparative contributions, attentive to how care is produced, negotiated and justified. Moving beyond both celebratory or dystopian accounts of digital health, it asks what happens when the limits of care are technologically extended, administratively redistributed and interactionally renegotiated in turbulent times.