Short Abstract

What if the boundaries between health activism and influencing blur? This panel examines how platformization transforms participation, expertise, and the politics of health communication in digital environments.

Description

Digital platforms are transforming the ways health, illness, and bodies are experienced, communicated, and governed. This ongoing platformization of health reconfigures long-standing forms of participation, expertise, and activism that STS has explored for decades. Forms of participation from below, such as evidence-based activism and biocitizenship, find new spaces and opportunities for enactment, while refused-knowledge communities bring their marginalised claims to wider audiences. This scholarship has shown how patients and lay people mobilise expertise to contest biomedical authority and democratise knowledge online. Today, however, these participatory practices increasingly unfold within platform infrastructures driven by algorithmic visibility, monetisation, and datafication. These socio-technical transformations reshape subjectivity, embodiment, and the politics of participation.

This is particularly evident in the emerging figure of the health influencer, ranging from patient-influencers to healthcare professionals active on digital platforms, raising the question of whether these actors represent a continuation of activism or rather a substantially different phenomenon. Increasingly, it has been noted that the boundaries between these two modes of communicating and enacting health online appear blurred. While health activism has historically relied on collective action, solidarity, and contestation, influencer practices centre on individual branding, visibility, and partnerships with institutions and companies. They amplify patient voices and peer knowledge, yet also risk reproducing inequalities and spreading commercialised or low-evidence content.

In line with the conference theme of exploring resilient socio-technical futures, this panel asks: what if the boundaries between health activism and health influencing increasingly blur? How might such entanglements shape the future of digital health communication, and what forms of resilience, empowerment, and accountability could emerge?

We invite empirical and theoretical contributions that address, but are not limited to:

• Shifting repertoires, solidarities, and lay expertise from activism to influencing;

• Authority, legitimacy, and accountability in digital health cultures;

• Algorithmic visibility, monetisation, and inequality;

• Platform agency in reshaping health communication and imaginaries of resilient futures.

This Traditional Open Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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