Paper short abstract:

Through a comparative angle, this speaker provides insight into the ways multimodal affordances of social media enable varied, both collective and individual acts of resistance and self-help when healthcare systems malfunction.

Paper long abstract:

Though years have passed since the glorious days of Twitter's 2009-2013 use in grassroots mobilization, social media continue to play a pivotal role in crises and conflicts globally. As a digital ethnographer, I have studied the way digital is used in situations of crisis and precarity in a variety of settings. In my main line of work, I have been focusing on resistance to healthcare malfunctioning, in Poland and the US, inquiring into the role the Internet plays in everyday self-help practices when the systemic support fails. Simultaneously, however, I have been employing my ethnographic sensibilities casually, and rather habitually, when thrown into the windmill of more abrupt medical and humanitarian crises as a volunteer or advocate. The 2021 medicine shortage crisis in Lebanon, where I resided temporarily, relied on informal, social-media-based supplied networks. The 2022 escalation of the Russian war on Ukraine, made many Poles, myself included, use messaging apps and social networking sites on a scale never seen before to organize resistance and aid. Last, but not least, I have closely followed the 2023-2024 Israel-Palestine conflict, where the multimodality of social media is used thoroughly to document, mediate and advocate. Building on qualitative as well as quantitative data, I will bring to the roundtable a comparative overview of the many modes of health-related commoning, that occur or are enabled by digital communication technologies in situations of crisis and emergency. I will also reflect on the ambivalent role of digital anthropologists in such contexts.