SHAPE researchers Amanda Karlsson and Loni Ledderer, in collaboration with Carsten Stage, have recently published the article “Chronic illness publics: Identifying two types of peer patienthood on Facebook and Instagram” in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.

The article is part of PeerCare, an interdisciplinary project between IKK and Public Health - funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation - focusing on self-organizing communities on social media for people with one or more chronic conditions.

Four articles have been published based on PeerCare, which follow the four central themes from the coding work that preceded the articles; knowledge, (in)coherence, care and online publics.

The article aims to nuance the self-organizing communities by using theory on ‘publics’ as an analytical approach, and shows how different chronic publics help construct different ways of communicating and understanding illness. Thus, two different forms of peer-patienthood are created: the activist and the more existentially supportive.

Read the full article here.