Assistive Ecologies, Not Technologies: Complicating “Technosolutionism” with Experiences of Families of Non-Speaking People with Cerebral Palsy in Russia

Abstract This paper theorizes interactional assistance and technologies supporting people’s communication as a part of larger structures, or ecologies, of care. Using examples from my ethnographic fieldwork in pre-2022 Russia with families of children and young adults with communication and mobility disabilities, I discuss how eyetrackers found different uses (and sometimes none) in every family. In most families, eyetrackers played a peripheral role in the overall ecology of children's communication (especially with pre- or non-literate children), but their importance grew for older teenagers who learnt to type using an eyetracker. In the second part of the paper, I zoom in on the way care and interactional assistance are organized within one particular family of Ivan and Anastasia. This family developed a unique system of home communication that preceded the use of the eyetracker and kept being used after Ivan adopted the eyetracker as a learning and (increasingly) typing device. Expanding here the notion of assistive technologies, I talk about significant others as agents providing key interactional assistance – those who share extensive common ground and interactional context and mediate agency of non-speaking familiar communication partners in essential ways.