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Like a Grinding Stone: How Crowdfunding Platforms Create, Perpetuate, and Value Health Inequities
Author(s) -
Kenworthy Nora
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1111/maq.12639
Subject(s) - health equity , sociology , unpacking , narrative , public relations , health care , social media , ethnography , odds , political science , medicine , philosophy , linguistics , logistic regression , anthropology , law
This article explores how inequities are reproduced by, and valued within, the increasingly ubiquitous world of medical crowdfunding. As patients use platforms like GoFundMe to solicit donations for health care, success stories inundate social media. But most crowdfunders experience steep odds and marginal benefits. Drawing on the problematic figure of the “black box” in health disparities research and technology studies, I offer ethnography as a tool for unpacking often inscrutable and complex pathways through which online platforms amplify inequities. By leveraging both online and traditional research strategies—a platform analysis and paired narratives of crowdfunders’ disparate experiences, drawn from open‐ended interviews—this article explores how inequities are created and experienced by users. The analysis highlights how inequities are simultaneously central to the functioning of this marketplace and occluded by its platform design. Consequently, crowdfunding is concealing health inequities while shifting public values about who is entitled to health care, and why.