Contribution short abstract:

Online medical crowdfunding has created a common space for stories of health, illness, disability. Marketised logics create normative pressures, but political consciousness is also evident in campaigner and donor practices. How might anthropologists interpret contradictory evidence on 'resistance'?

Contribution long abstract:

The growth of online medical crowdfunding has created a common space for public storytelling about health, illness, disability. But this is often in the context of severe personal crises within precarious neoliberal healthcare systems. My three-year study of crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand explored this. On Givealittle, the national crowdfunding platform, more than 70% of the health-related campaigns relate to acute illness or disease (e.g. cancer). But other types of needs are also represented, my study focusing on people fundraising for gender-affirming care; weight-loss procedures; and wearable devices for chronic illnesses. The competitive, marketised setting put pressure on campaigners to craft words and images that made their (non-normative) bodies legible and deserving to fragmented audiences…. often in ways that reinforced ableist, racist, cis-normative, and fatphobic normativities. At the same time - despite claims in existing US-based literature that crowdfunding encourages highly individualising forms of storytelling, and masks structural issues - my data showed political consciousness and activist work as widespread in the actions and artifacts of both campaigners and potential donors. Can crowdfunding platforms become sites for civic conversation, advocacy, or protest? What does resistance look like in this setting, and how might anthropologists identify it, when there is such contradictory evidence on the potential of these digital assemblages for ‘undoing’ the systemic inequalities that drive people to them? Considering my experiences of researching ethnographically outside the geographic locus of existing literature, I also ask how specific the answers are, to the national/sociocultural contexts in which globalised technologies are engaged.