Dr Ike Kamphof (D.J.)

My current research focuses on how new media and technologies transform networks of care, specifically in the care for frail elderly people and in multispecies relationships and nature conservation. I am interested in how new meanings and ethical norms emerge in these networks.

Together with my colleague, Dr. Ruud Hendriks, I focus at the moment on nature-based interventions in dementia care. 

A second project investigates the history of the relationship of people (notably farmers and villagers) to their landscape. This project is based largely on interviews and archive research around one farm in a small village in Belgium.

I was projectleader of the researchproject Make-Believe Matters. The Moral Role Things Play in Dementia Care. (ZonMW, 2016-2018; together with dr. Ruud Hendriks and prof. dr. Tsjalling Swierstra). This project investigated how low and high tech interventions in dementia care mediate care practices and the values embedded in them, in particular values challenged by deception: authenticity, trust, dignity, autonomy and integrity.

https://www.zonmw.nl/nl/onderzoek-resultaten/kwaliteit-van-zorg/programmas/project-detail/ethiek-en-gezondheid-2012-2015/make-believe-matters-the-moral-role-things-play-in-dementia-care/

From 2010-2012 I participated in the project Beyond Autonomy and Language; Towards a Disability Studies Perspective on Dementia (ZonMW; together with dr. Ruud Hendriks, Annette Hendrikx MA, dr. Aagje Swinnen). This project investigated innovative practices in which people with dementia were enabled to emerge as persons with their own unique identity. My part in this project focused on telecare applications and sociable robots. 

From 2006 onward, part of my research focussed on webcamera's. Webcams are widely used as the contact points between real and virtual spaces. I investigate the ways in which webcams evoke co-presence and foster new kinds of global relationships.
in e.g. nature conservation and the care for elderly family members.

My main methodology is practical phenomenology, with an emphasis on perception as the experience of embodied beings.

Participatory observation and virtual ethnography are tools employed to study user practices.

I published a book of essays (In Dutch) on everyday structures of voyeurism (in travel, on the street and in social networks, in surveillance and while watching animals):

Ike Kamphof (2013) Iedereen Voyeur. Kijken en bekeken worden in de 21e eeuw. Zoetermeer: Klement.

http://www.uitgeverijklement.nl/shop_details.php?productId=24161

For a Dutch introduction into this book, see

http://www.filoblog.nl/2013/03/04/hoe-bewonen-we-kijkend-en-ziend-onze-omgeving-door-ike-kamphof/

The relationship between aesthetics and ethics, my main focus, is prominently present in the early aesthetics of the 18th and 19th century. In my Dutch translation of Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (2006) I explore this theme in the introduction (and commentary). 

I. Kant Opmerkingen over het gevoel voor het schone en het sublieme. Budel: Damon, 2006. Vertaling, inleiding en aantekeningen Ike Kamphof. ISBN 9055736627. 144pp.