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About

Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen is a Danish researcher whose work sits at the intersection of welfare technology, assistive robotics, and disability care. Drawing extensively on ethnographic methods and sociomaterial theory, Nickelsen has made significant contributions to understanding how care robots — particularly feeding assistance robots — are implemented, experienced, and sustained within Scandinavian welfare systems. His most influential work, "Imagining and tinkering with assistive robotics in care for the disabled" (2019, 21 citations), critically examines how political and media narratives around digitization shape the deployment of welfare technologies in Denmark, offering a grounded counterpoint to top-down policy optimism. Across his body of work, Nickelsen explores the complex entanglements of policy, design, and care practice, notably applying script theory to reveal how assistive technologies encode assumptions about user autonomy and choice. His ethnographic research with disabled citizens navigating conditions such as multiple sclerosis provides rare, nuanced insight into the lived realities of technology adoption in care settings. Themes of active citizenship, self-care, and the reconfiguration of dependency run throughout his scholarship. Collectively, his publications offer researchers and practitioners an important critical framework for evaluating the promises — and limitations — of welfare technology in contemporary disability care.