Complicit Bodies: A Carnal Sociology of Robot Interactions in Dementia Care

This article examines the embodied entanglement of the ethnographic researcher in the social dynamics surrounding robot animals in dementia care. Drawing on multi-sited focused fieldwork in Swedish and French care homes, informed by Wacquant’s carnal sociology and Lydahl’s situated shadowing, we explore four registers: when residents find the researcher more compelling than the robot; when care workers stage performances for the watching researcher; when the researcher becomes an improvised care partner; and when the researcher actively shapes the robot encounter’s therapeutic framing. Across