Contemporary visualities of ill health: On the social (media) construction of disease regimes.

First-person representations of illness have been studied as key to the cultural fabric disrupting dominant practices of ill health or disease regimes. However, the role that digital platforms play in shaping this fabric in contemporary societies has been mostly overlooked. We address this gap by investigating how mainstream social media, as mundane spaces modelled by corporate-driven techno-commercial structures, frame specific forms of visuality or ways to see ill health.

One Platform, a Thousand Worlds: On Twitter Irony in the Early Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy.

On 22 February 2020, 11 municipalities in Northern Italy became the first COVID-19 red zone of Europe. Two days later, when it became evident that the virus had been spreading in the country for weeks, Italy entered a "buffer zone," a temporal zone between normality and pandemic. The buffer zone lasted around 2 weeks and thrived with irony flowing on social media through memes, multimedia remixes, and jokes.

Twitter and Non-Elites: Interpreting Power Dynamics in the Life Story of the (#)BRCA Twitter Stream.

In May 2013 and March 2015, actress Angelina Jolie wrote in the about her choice to undergo preventive surgery. In her two op-eds, she explained that - as a carrier of the BRCA1 gene mutation - preventive surgery was the best way to lower her heightened risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. By applying a digital methods approach to BRCA-related tweets from 2013 and 2015, before, during, and after the exposure of Jolie's story, this study maps and interprets Twitter discursive dynamics at two time points of the BRCA Twitter stream.

Health activism and the logic of connective action. A case study of rare disease patient organisations.

This exploratory work investigates the role of digital media in expanding health discourse practices in a way to transform traditional structures of agency in public health. By focusing on a sample of rare disease patient organisations as representative of contemporary health activism, this study investigates the role of digital communication in the development of (1) bottom-up sharing and co-production of health knowledge, (2) health public engagement dynamics and (3) health information pathways. Findings show that digital media affordances for patient organisations go beyond the provision of social support for patient communities; they ease one-way, two-way and crowdsourced processes of health knowledge sharing, exchange and co-production, provide personalised routes to health public engagement and bolster the emergence of varied pathways to health information where experiential knowledge and medical authority are equally valued.