Short Abstract

This panel explores how rumours both produce and reduce uncertainty at the intersection of different medical approaches. Focusing on online dynamics in trans-local African contexts, it addresses broader questions of uncertainty, legitimacy, and digital publics.

Long Abstract

Rumours play a central and well-established role in African studies, whether as a key modality of meaning-making in relation to colonial violence (White 2000), or as a potentially subversive medium of public debate (Ellis 1989, 1993). As new technologies contribute to globalizing and digitizing the dynamics of the radio trottoir far beyond the purview of African cities (Newell 2021; Tonda 2026), the analysis of virtual rumours gains renewed importance. It now seeks to inform our understanding of a trans-local public sphere that transgresses geographical boundaries and re-shapes social relations.

This panel’s primary empirical focus is on health-related rumours circulating online and offline. If health problems inherently confront people with uncertainty, and if healthcare institutions themselves may be experienced as fragile, inaccessible, or unpredictable, users of healthcare services become managers of uncertainty (Arborio, 2007). Healthcare professionals, whether from established professional bodies or situated outside and in between the standard categories of "biomedical", "Chinese" and “traditional” medicine, can rely on social media to promote certain products and services and to delegitimize others. Online rumors play an important role in these negotiations surrounding the legitimacy and effectiveness of diverse health-related approaches. Juxtaposing religious, mystical, socio-economic and digital domains, they describe and reveal the relations, resources, imageries, options and strategies that people mobilize to navigate the uncertainties of health (Oyane Ossah, 2025; Smith et al., 1999). In this panel, we invite theoretical and empirical contributions that explore novel perspectives in this regard.

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