Paper short abstract:

Recognizing the materiality of communication practices, this paper examines how mediated biomedical expertise becomes intertwined with the social and embodied experience of injury in an online community to produce situated knowledges that challenge or reconfigure dominant biomedical practice.

Paper long abstract:

In STS explorations of configurations between technoscience, biomedicine and society, the communication technologies that mediate and shape these engagements have been largely ignored. The internet alters users' relationship with biomedical expertise in two main ways: it provides individuals with previously inaccessible medical expertise from multiple sources; and it allows them to form communities where they can negotiate this expertise and share their experiences of health and illness. Using the model of coproduction, this paper investigates how recreational runners negotiate the care of their material bodies in this virtual space. The ethnographic methods include a case study of the online collective, Running Mania, in particular, participant observation of the injury forum and interviews with the website's users. The paper argues that even in the absence of direct expert involvement, collective reflexivity toward freely accessible mediated medical expertise becomes intertwined with runners' social and embodied experiential expertise to produce new forms of situated knowledge and caring practices that often challenge or reconfigure dominant medical practice. However, the body is problematized online, where embodied expertise is (re)produced in the absence of a running body, blurring the distinction between interactional expertise (talking about running) and contributory expertise (doing running). In this virtual space, embodied expertise becomes entangled in the discursive performance of individual identity, the online enactment of a collective running practice, the attempt to articulate often tacit knowledge, and complex responses regarding trust of medical advice in the absence of face-to-face communication.