Tanja Ahlin is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University. She is an anthropologist of health and technology and a Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar whose work examines how people live, age, and care with digital technologies and robots. As a recipient of a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), she is Principal Investigator of the project Paw Support, which investigates technology acceptance and resistance through the case of animal-shaped social robots in elder care in the Netherlands.

More information about Tanja Ahlin

Tanja Ahlin is Research Fellow at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University. She is Principal Investigator of the NWO Veni project Paw Support, which investigates how older adults, care workers, and institutions accept or resist animal-shaped social robots in Dutch elder care settings. The project aims to support personalised long-term care, deliberately making space for both technological and non-technological routes to good care at a time of scarce resources.

Tanja is is a visiting professor at KU Leuven (Belgium) and holds an appointment as Assistant Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Slovenia). She is affiliated with the Centre for Digital Anthropology at UCL and is a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute of Global Health and Development (AIGHD). Previously, Tanja was a postdoctoral researcher in the 'Human Factor in New Technologies' programme at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, where she also received her PhD.

You can learn more about Tanja and her work on her personal website.

Calling Family

Tanja's monograph Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives was published by Rutgers University Press in 2023. The book draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in India and Oman and on digital "field events" to explore how digital technologies shape family care at a distance when living in the same place is not the most feasible option - and how such digitally enacted care influences kinship and gender in transnational families.

Digital Technologies and Questions of Good Care

Across her projects, Tanja's work is united by a central question: how do technologies shape the ways people practice care, and what kinds of belonging and wellbeing do they make possible, or foreclose? Her earlier research explored these questions through the experiences of transnational families from Kerala, India, whose adult children had moved abroad for work as professional nurses. With them, she examined how video calls and messaging apps such as WhatsApp were integrated into the daily practices of caring for aging parents at a distance. This work culminated in her monograph Calling Family (Rutgers University Press, 2023). Building on this knowledge, Tanja explored how technologies mediate identity and belonging among deaf and hard-of-hearing young people in the Netherlands, as a collaborator on the Meer dan doof (More than Deaf) project.

In her current NWO Veni project Paw Support, she turns to animal-shaped social robots in Dutch elder care, asking how older adults, care workers, and institutions navigate the introduction of these technologies into intimate everyday settings and what this reveals about broader assumptions of what constitutes good care in times of scarce resources.

Publications