Screening Health: Digital Platforms and the Reconfiguration of Bodies, Expertise, and Care in a Multipolarising World
Convener: Elan Lazuardi
Co-convener: Asmi Ramiyati
This panel explores how digital platforms and media are fundamentally reshaping health knowledge, care relationships, bodily practices, and medical authority across the multipolarising Global South. Building on Deborah Lupton (2018) notion of digitised healthy citizens’, we explore how social media is saturated with transnational wellness trends, circulating expertise, products, and biomedical innovations across shifting geopolitical currents. As new economic and cultural poles gain currency, digital health cultures offer productive and vivid sites for understanding how multipolarisation is lived and contested through everyday bodily practices. This panel focuses on the key question: how do digital platforms mediate, challenge, and reconfigure current understanding of health, care, and the good life?
Our analyses draw from biopolitics and governmentality (Foucault 1980), medicalisation/demedicalisation (Zola 1983; Conrad 1992), healthism (Crawford 1977), feminist care theory (Noddings 1984), and affordances (boyd 2011; Costa 2018). These critical frameworks illuminate how bodies become sites of moral evaluation, contested medical authority, algorithmic governance, and entrepreneurial aspirations. Through these lenses, we examine the diverse processes through which health is governed in digital spaces, as well as the roles and practices of various actors within the digital health ecosystem.
Three papers are confirmed for this panel. The first paper by Ramiyati examines how medical professionals utilise platform affordances, such as video stitching, to extend and defend their authority beyond clinical environments. The second paper, written by Agatta, examines the proliferation of content on social media about mental well-being. It analyses how this content shapes the understanding and negotiation of well-being, particularly in the context of economic precarity. Lastly, Lazuardi’s paper theorises ‘digital healthism’ in Indonesia by extending Crawford’s ‘healthism’ concept into the digital sphere, examining how moralised health discourses circulating on social media draw on multiple global influences in a multipolarising media landscape.
We seek additional contributions that extend this conversation, particularly those that bring pluriversal health-related knowledge from diverse ontological frameworks into dialogue with Western biomedical models. We invite ethnographic or qualitative studies from Indonesia and other settings in the Global South, exploring the following questions:
How do social media affordances reconfigure who can speak authoritatively about health and bodies?
How do algorithmic logics, verification systems, and monetisation features influence what is considered legitimate health knowledge?
And, how do diverse communities navigate tensions between neoliberal discourses of self-optimisation and practices of care and relational wellbeing in the digital space?
Contributors are encouraged to consider the questions above in relation to the following topics (but not limited to): Korean/Japanese beauty and skincare cultures; natural and non-toxic lifestyles, as well as the slow-living movement; traditional healing practices; fitness cultures; wearable technologies and self-tracking apps; mental health influencers and spiritual healing; and Islamic wellness culture and halal healthy lifestyles.
This panel contributes to anthropological debates on governance, care, and futurity, by highlighting how digital health cultures function simultaneously as instruments of neoliberal discipline and as potential sites of democratisation, transformative community-building, and resistance. In line with this year’s ISJAI theme, this panel highlights how multipolarisation manifests not only in geopolitical realignments but also through everyday digital engagements, bodily practices, and struggles over who gets to define health and care in an increasingly multipolarised moral world.