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Paper short abstract

Conceptualizing Instagram as a socio-technical infrastructure and communication as a practice of care, this paper examines how healthcare professionals in early childhood nutrition act as mediators of health knowledge, linking it into everyday practices and public health concerns.

Paper long abstract

Nutrition has become an increasingly relevant issue for public health. Malnutrition, in fact, concerns both those who lack access to sufficient food and those who consume excessive amounts of it. Italy is among the European countries with the highest rates of childhood obesity, a situation that has important implications for the sustainability of the healthcare system and the prevalence of chronic diseases. Influencing nutritional practices becomes relevant across scales, from the individual to the collective, and may contribute to mitigating the social and economic impacts of malnutrition. In this context, digital communication may play a key role in shaping awareness and everyday nutritional habits because, in recent years, digital platforms have become key sites for health communication, functioning as socio-technical infrastructures through which health knowledge is produced and circulated. However, to be effective, communication must not only be evidence-based but also translated into everyday practices.

Drawing on platform studies and feminist technoscience studies, this paper conceptualizes communication as a situated practice of care that contributes to raising awareness about nutrition and healthy habits. It examines the role of expert health influencers in early childhood nutrition. The study analyzes a corpus of posts published on Instagram by 48 healthcare professionals between July 2021 and July 2024, combining discourse and content analysis. The findings show that they act as mediators of health knowledge, translating scientific evidence and public health guidelines into actionable practices while connecting everyday experiences with broader public health concerns, thereby contributing to the enactment of care through platform-based communication.