Constitution of the market through social media: Dialogical co-production of medicine in a virtual health community organization

This research explores new systems of marketing, and new roles and relationships of organizations and consumers developing in healthcare as a result of transformations occurring in technology, consumer/marketer value systems, forms of discourse and institutional roles. Inspired by observations from a Medicine 2.0 community organization, which turn social networking into a business phenomenon – PatientsLikeMe (PLM) – I explore how such systems develop and function and the institutionalizations that reconstitute roles and maintain relationships among actors in these systems through netnographic research. That is, (1) why and how patients in PLM participate in the social co-production of medical knowledge and experience, and (2) how the ‘community’ organizes roles and relations, and institutionalize ‘sharing’ in healthcare where privacy dominates relations. Findings articulate a dialogical approach to organizing roles and relations with the dilution of provisioning in this co-mediated market system, which reflects collaborative, connective and communal relations built on dialogues among diverse healthcare actors. From a theoretical vantage point, Foucauldian notions of biopower and govern-mentality are reconsidered in order to articulate why and how such a system may be attracting healthcare actors and maintain their interest and sharing in this community

Control responsibility : the discursive construction of privacy, teens, and Facebook in Flemish newspapers

This study explores the discursive construction of online privacy through a critical discourse analysis of Flemish newspapers' coverage of privacy, teens, and Facebook between 2007 and 2018 to determine what representation of (young) users the papers articulate. A privacy-as-control discourse is dominant and complemented by two other discourses: that of the unconcerned and reckless teenager and that of the promise of media literacy. Combined, these discourses form an authoritative language on privacy that we call "control responsibility." Control responsibility presents privacy as an individual responsibility that can be controlled and needs to be learned by young users. We argue that the discourses contribute to a neoliberal rationality and have a disciplinary effect that strengthens various forms of responsibilization

Children, family and the state : revisiting public and private realms

The state is often viewed as part of the impersonal public sphere in opposition to the private family as a locus of warmth and intimacy. In recent years this modernist dichotomy has been challenged by theoretical and institutional trends which have altered the relationship between state and family. This paper explores changes to both elements of the dichotomy that challenge this relationship: a more fragmented family structure and more individualised and networked support for children. It will also examine two new elements that further disrupt any clear mapping between state/family and public/private dichotomies: the third party role of the child in family/state affairs and children's application of virtual technology that locates the private within new cultural and social spaces. The paper concludes by examining the rise of the 'individual child' hitherto hidden within the family/state dichotomy and the implications this has for intergenerational relations at personal and institutional levels

The (dis)establishment of gender: Care and gender roles in the family as a constitutional matter

This article reasons that for women, as constitutional subjects, the emancipatory promise of constitutionalism was—from its inception—fundamentally limited by the entrenchment of the separate spheres tradition. Focusing on evolving constitutional jurisprudence in the US, Germany and Italy, the article describes a gradual and still imperfect process of (dis) establishment of the originally enshrined gender order, as it has unfolded since the 1970s in US and European constitutionalism. It is argued that these processes have allowed the constitutional doctrine of sex equality to challenge the most forthright expressions of the separate spheres ideology, denying the possibility of according men and women a different legal status of rights and duties and keeping women away from the marketplace. In spite of this, to this day, the sex constitutional equality doctrine has been an inadequate tool to fully subvert the pre-established gender order in both its transatlantic iterations. In the US, we find assimilationist workerism with its anti-stereotyping conception of gender equality, providing no support for working women, and in Europe accommodationist workerism, wherein special measures are fostered at the risk of entrenching rather than subverting existing gender roles. The article then describes recent evolutions in constitutionalism pointing to a promising third way, with Nordic inspiration, which, challenging traditionally accepted notions of family privacy and foregrounding fatherhood as opposed to just motherhood, would allow us to retain the central importance attached to care and reproduction, but at the same time assist in the process of overcoming traditional gender assumptions and stereotypes built around them

Sexuality and Sovereignty: The Global Limits and Possibilities of Lawrence Symposium: Legal Rights in Historical Perspective: From the Margins to the Mainstream

In the summer of 2003, the Supreme Court handed gay and lesbian activists a stunning victory in the decision of Lawrence v. Texas, which summarily overruled Bowers v. Hardwick. At issue was whether Texas\u27 prohibition of same-sex sexual conduct violated the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In a powerful, poetic, and strident opinion, Justice Kennedy, writing for a six-member majority, reversed Bowers, observing that individual decisions regarding physical intimacy between consenting adults, either of the same or opposite sex, are constitutionally protected, and thus fall outside of the reach of state intervention. Volumes can be written about the decision; it represents a culmination of nearly a century\u27s worth of work in dismantling prejudicial views on gays and lesbians in American law and, indeed, the rest of the world. In this article, I explore Lawrence\u27s hidden and unstated implications for the recent globalization of gay civil rights, and contemplate whether Lawrence is yet another symbol of a global wave of change, or whether it represents an ultimately unfulfillable goal worldwide, particularly in places where gay civil rights movements have been met with considerable backlash. I will argue in this paper that a close reading of Lawrence represents a culmination of a historic, and increasingly global, convergence between liberty, privacy, and anti-essentialist theories of sexual identity. Indeed, the ultimate significance of Lawrence lies not in its overt shielding of sexual minorities from criminalization, but rather in its willingness to offer to the American (indeed global) public, a version of sexual autonomy that is filled with both promise and danger, fragility and universality. For, quite unlike Bowers, which largely directed its judicial gaze towards gays and lesbians in particular, the court in Lawrence carried a message of sexual self-determination for everyone, irrespective of sexual orientation. Emerging from this decision is a vision of sexual self-determination, what I call sexual sovereignty, that represents the intersectional convergence of three separate prisms: spatial privacy, expressive liberty, and deliberative autonomy. At the same time, by examining the case law that has flourished in its wake, we see that it has often been correlated with an implicit logic of containment that has relegated the exercise of sexual autonomy to private, rather than public, spaces. In creating a space for the convergence of all three facets, I would argue that Lawrence is a triumph - and a product - of anti-essentialism, but its implicit logic of containment limits its potential to traverse both theoretical and global divisions regarding culture and sexuality. Consequently, ultimately, despite the power of its universalist vision, this Article argues that Lawrence is circumscribed by potential limitations wrought by culture, property, nationality, and citizenship

Habitual Disclosure: Routine, Affordance and the Ethics of Young Peoples Social Media Data Surveillance

Drawing on findings from qualitative interviews and photo elicitation, this paper explores young people’s experiences of breaches of trust with social media platforms and how comfort is re-established despite continual violations. It provides rich qualitative accounts of users habitual relations with social media platforms. In particular, we seek to trace the process by which online affordances create conditions in which ‘sharing’ is regarded as not only routine and benign but pleasurable. Rather it is the withholding of data that is abnormalised. This process has significant implications for the ethics of data collection by problematising a focus on ‘consent’ to data collection by social media platforms. Active engagement with social media, we argue, is premised on a tentative, temporary, shaky trust that is repeatedly ruptured and repaired. We seek to understand the process by which violations of privacy and trust in social media platforms are remediated by their users and rendered ordinary again through everyday habits. We argue that the processes by which users become comfortable with social media platforms, through these routines, calls for an urgent reimagining of data privacy beyond the limited terms of consent