Livia Garofalo

A Certain Regard: Care as Noticing

Livia Garofalo

Data & Society Research Institute

livia@datasociety.net

As the world shifts more to digital spaces as ways to deliver medical and psychological care, this paper takes a creative and anthropological approach to understand these changes in the art of “noticing” as a fundamental cornerstone of clinical practice and beyond. Drawing from fieldwork with psychotherapists in the United States and Intensive Care physicians in Argentina, I take the trained eye and therapeutic sight in teletherapy and medicine as an object of inquiry for a broader reflection around the ways technology mediates our noticing as an intrinsically human activity. I explore what lies behind the screen and development of relations that underlie psychotherapy and medicine as an act of caring. As John Berger articulates in Ways of Seeing (1972), “what we look at is an act of choice” and, within this choice, a relation. I seek to examine how well-being and “well-seeing” relate to each other as mediated by technology. Devices and instruments have always intervened in how we observe and notice, from the invention of eyeglasses to the first photographic camera to Zoom rooms and AI-powered radiology scans. These changes in attention have affected how we look at the world around us, how we relate to ourselves and each other, and how care is delivered and received. Reframing the practice of noticing away from discourses about “the attention economy” or the constant nudging by devices, I am instead interested in turning to how the medical gaze is being refashioned and how care-as-attention is transformed, especially in medical encounters. Noticing and paying attention are actions of care and solidarity. Far from being ancillary to our life, these acts are necessary for individual and collective nourishment and flourishing in the face of suffering and pain. To “have regard” is to have concern and care to things that might not be in our immediate purview and turn to how medical gaze is changing, as global inequalities deepen and remain.

BIOGRAPHY

Livia Garofalo, PhD/MPH, is a cultural and medical anthropologist, and a researcher with Data & Society’s Trustworthy Infrastructures team, where she focuses on technologies and infrastructures of healthcare, broadly defined. She is interested in understanding how people experience and make meaning in times of crisis, how conditions of illness and distress are treated inside and outside clinical settings, and how power and subjectivity show up in everyday life. Her recent projects have examined the delivery of critical care; the intersection of labor, technology, and health; and mental health and the platformization of psychotherapy. She has done research in Europe, Latin America, and the US. Livia holds a PhD in Anthropology and a Master’s in Public Health from Northwestern University. Her doctoral research on inequality, trauma, and economic crisis in intensive care units in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was funded by the US Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in cultural anthropology from the University of Bologna, Italy.