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Short abstract:

The paper analyses discourses on health and wellbeing performed in two communities building knowledge refused by science. The study employs a mixed-method approach, combining qualitative techniques and social network analysis, to identify epistemic structures within these social worlds.

Long abstract:

This paper deals with the social configurations through which online communities build discourses aimed at conferring credibility to knowledge about healthcare. The study focuses on two different case studies of communities devoted to promoting health practices not approved (or explicitly refused) by science and aimed at improving wellbeing and curing diseases. Theoretically, these communities are conceived of as social worlds within which people work to legitimise knowledge claims, while knowledge itself is understood as a discursive assemblage of claims and heterogeneous actors enrolled to legitimise them. The proposal illustrates the mixed-method strategy adopted for the study, which relies on a combination of qualitative techniques and social network analysis (SNA). Through a web-ethnography conducted from January 2020 to December 2021, we analysed universes of discourse (Mead, 1972; Clarke and Star, 2008) shared within these communities, and investigated the discursive relational structures of each social world by two-mode network models in which knowledge claims are connected to the actors supporting these claims. Relying on SNA and factorial techniques (community detection, betweenness centrality scores, multiple correspondence analysis), an analysis of the configuration of claim–actor connections is provided and the ‘flexible’ objects linking diverse sub-groups of nodes — that is, claims or actors that act as ‘boundary objects’. The analysis shows the hybrid nature of the epistemic structures shared within these social worlds, where different repertoires and processes of “translation of science” act to support knowledge refused by science.