Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the narrative exchanges posted on the Polish online board devoted to ADHD in children. The forum is understood as a form of biosociality, a space where uncertainty and social conflicts are represented and managed and where identities, informed by the transnational flows of biomedical knowledge and practice, are interactively engendered.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of narratives posted on the Polish online forum devoted to the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This online community of speakers consists mainly of parents of children diagnosed, or suspected of suffering from ADHD, as well as experts, who direct the exchanges, navigate the uncertainty and represent an authoritative voice.

Joint in an interactive semiotic effort, the online narrators actively build a theory of and stabilize a particular imagery of ADHD understood as a medical condition. In this paper I focus on the sense of security derived from the compliance to the dominant story promoted by the community. I claim that the discussion board mediates and supports the transnational institutionalized knowledges of ADHD (produced by the WHO, implemented by the Polish state bureaucracy) and normalizes them.

Eventually, I look at the politics of narration characterizing the forum. I ask about ways in which, through efforts of differently positioned forum participants, certain authoritative accounts are accomplished and how they constrain and frame subsequent discussions. I notice how little value is attached to the stories produced by children, and how children hold no control over the process by which the ADHD story is told and their identites are framed by the adult online speakers.

The forum is understood as a social space where social conflict is represented and mediated (parent-child, parent-doctor, parent/child-school) as well as it is read as a point where identities, informed by the transnational flows of biomedical knowledge and practice, are interactively produced.