Abstract:

Nowadays, the acknowledgment of technology pervasiveness and of its active role in human beings' existence and in their experience has contributed to focus the attention on the non-human agency in different aspects of people’s life and to debate on the effects of individuals’ health.

In fact, the non-human (technologies, materials, objects and animals) is not only a tool or a passive and inert matter, but it is part of that complex thread twine of variables that, according to the bio-psycho social model, contributes in defining a person’s health.

A representative case study is type 1 diabetes, a chronic disease which is on the rise all over the world. Diabetic patients’ bodies interact with technologies, objects and procedures without which they could not survive.

This paper intends to illustrate, from a pedagogic point of view, the hidden educational role of technology in the socio-medical area, and, in particular, in the practices of self-management of type 1 diabetes. This role is underlined by the results of a qualitative empirical research that intends to study the formative effects produced by the use of two different technical objects – insulin pen and pump – on adult diabetic patients.

The research is based on the experiences of eight type 1 diabetic patients, collected through in-depth interviews and analyzed by following Actor-Network Theory, the theoretical and methodological background of this research. It highlights the socio-material character of a self-management practice and the agency of artifacts inside the network which produces the practice and shows several formative and performative influences made on the patient by the artifacts.

Self-management emerges as a dual practice. On one hand, it is a useful and precious medical disposal, which lets the patients manage the pathology with a recovery of autonomy and power on their life, stolen by the disease. On the other hand, it is a latent formative disposal that, by acting various influences on the patient, produces awkwardness and different effects on the self-management itself, often without awareness from the patient and other people involved in the care.

The attention on socio-material relationships in this practice has allowed to find out the latent formative dimension inside self–management practice, making it a case of study and object of a pedagogic reconfiguration to sustain formative processes of diabetic self–management and to reduce the discomfort, as to improve the patient’s life quality and disease management.

In this way, there will be new caring horizons for type 1 diabetic patients, in which medical cure and educative care dialogue together in an integrative approach.

Keywords:

Diabetes, Materiality, Technology, Actor Network Theory, Informal education, Formative pressures.