The educational and social sciences are confronted with an increasing (re)centering of materialities, which opens up the possibility of moving away from a purely human-centered perspective. Materiality can be used as a new factor for transformation and learning processes in organizations and their orders (cf. Maack 2024). These re-centerings become particularly virulent when considering the use of social-emotional robotics in elderly care. Social-emotional robotics refers to an artificial and application-oriented machine that has a humanoid or animaloid appearance and can recognize and process emotional expressions using programmed algorithms (cf. Graf et al. 2020; Naß et al. 2020). The suggestion of an (intelligent) life of its own is at the forefront, whereby social-emotional robotics redefines communication and interaction between humans and technology (cf. Bormann/Truschkat 2023). In this context, questions of role allocation and mutual addressing, as well as the renegotiation of organizational orders and practices from an organizational education perspective, come into focus (cf. Maack/Truschkat i.E.)

In our article, we therefore look at the use of social-emotional robotics and the associated transformations in the field of care and examine not only the question of how the connection between humans and technology is changing, but also what effects this has on care practices and the resulting organizational orders. To this end, the first part presents the current discourse on the practical use of social-emotional robotics in elderly care organizations. Building on this, the second part will examine the question of how this development affects the human-technology relationship and what consequences these transformations have for care practice and its organizational orders.

Even though only a few empirical studies are available to date, these considerations can be theoretically and conceptually linked to the more recent discourses of new materialism. With reference to Karen Barad (2012), it is therefore argued that the human-technology connection in the context of social-emotional robotics should rather be described as an 'intra-action'. This term, which is prominent in Barad's work, focuses on the interactive creation process of things, boundaries and orders and thus makes it possible to rethink organizational orders with the inclusion of a materiality-sensitive lens in the sense of 'charting the way forward'.

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