Amanda holds a PhD in media studies from Aarhus University 2020 and her project is a feminist ethnography on Danish women’s engagement with digital menstrual cycle trackers for smartphones and how these applications have both emancipatory and shame reproducing potentials. She recently completed a postdoc qualitatively studying patient led online communities (PLOCs) on social media to understand how citizens living with chronic conditions share and construct narratives of illness and wellness in public and closed communities. Amongst other findings, she and the research team discovered that these communities are overrepresented by women. 95% of the members of two large PLOCs in Denmark for people living with chronic conditions are women. This raises a series of questions about the gendered digital citizenship online.

Thus in SHAPE, Amanda will continue this path towards digital health and in her SHAPE-project study why men choose (not) to engage in PLOCs. This, to further our understanding of how and why PLOCs appear to become gendered spaces and lacks narratives of men’s health related experiences. The ‘invisible men-project’ will provide knowledge on gendered citizenship online in the intersection of chronic illness, social media and gender.