Elder women's visual narratives of digital technology in Kerala

Elder women in India are routinely positioned at the margins of digital ageing research, framed as technologically deficient rather than structurally excluded. This Photovoice study challenges that framing by examining how thirty elder women (aged 60-85) in Kochi, Kerala, experience, represent, and negotiate digital technology in everyday life. Using their own smartphones, participants generated photographs over a four-week period. Individual photo-elicitation interviews were conducted, and reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke was employed using ATLAS.ti Version 25. Six analytically distinct themes were generated. The study finds that digital exclusion among these women is socially produced rather than individually determined. Key mechanisms include anticipatory fear of blame leading to pre-emptive withdrawal, the paradox of protective gatekeeping enacted by adult children, spousal digital intermediacy whose structural fragility becomes visible at widowhood, and design injustice enacted through body-interface mismatches and memory-punishing authentication systems. Television emerged as the primary technology of emotional and temporal life, challenging smartphone-centred digital inclusion metrics. The study also documents elder women as active digital knowledge-producers within their communities and identifies a subset of participants exercising self-determined non-participation. Implications are discussed for digital inclusion policy, gerontological scholarship, and technology design.