Affective Resonance and Durability in Political Organizing: The case of patients who hack

Abstract

We explore the role of affect in fuelling and sustaining political organizing in the case of an online Type-1 Diabetes community. Analysing this community’s interactions, we show that the drive towards political transformation is triggered by affective dissonance, but that this dissonance needs to be recurrently enacted through the balanced circulation of objects of pain and hope. We propose the notion of affective resonance to illuminate the dynamic interplay that collectively moderates and fosters this circulation and that keeps bodies invested and reverberating together around shared political goals. Affective resonance points researchers toward the fragile and complex accomplishment that affective politics represents. Focusing particularly on the community’s interactions on Twitter, we also reflect on the role of (digital) resonance spaces in how affects circulate. By adopting and transposing concepts from affect theories into the context of patient communities, we further add important insights into the unique embodied challenges that chronic illness patients face. Highlighting the hope induced by techno-bodily emancipation that intertwine into a particular form of political organizing in such healthcare movements, we give emphasis to patient communities’ deeply embodied affects as important engines for political, social, and economic change.

The fluid affective space of organizational practices

“…This style of doing affective ethnography has been taken up and enriched with an attention to unexpected moment of awkwardness (Sløk-Andersen and Persson, 2021), critical engagement with moments of wonder (Christensen, 2021), affective resistance (Marsh and Sliwa, 2022), affective oscillation (Resch and Steyaert, 2020), the transformation of affective dissonance into affective solidarity (Baxter, 2021), embodied meaning-making (Pors, 2021), ethical enchantment (Bell et al, 2021), and collaborative affective ethnography (Parolin and Pellegrinelli, 2023). However, the attention to space/place remains rather under track and becomes more precise only in reference to entrepreneurial hubs co-constructing entrepreneurial identity (Katila et al, 2019), or cultural events as film festivals (De Molli et al, 2020), urban art (Michels and Steyaert, 2017), or patient community interactions on Twitter (Vidolov et al, 2023). For this reason I propose to go back to the second pillar of affective ethnographynamely placenessand re-think it in terms of the spatialization of affect and the affectivity of space.…”

Optimizing Predictive Performance: Hyperparameter Tuning in Stacked Multi-Kernel Support Vector Machine Random Forest Models for Diabetes Identification

“…Diabetes complications pose a significant economic burden, resulting in increased healthcare costs and productivity losses. Effective strategies for identification and intervention can improve individual health and mitigate the economic burden associated with diabetes [18], [19].…”

Epistemic and institutional recognition work in changing conditions of social visibility: Anosmia's journey from the shadows to the spotlight

“…With these reflections, we contribute to research on collective action around socially invisible medical conditions, particularly on such movements' institutional contexts and their ability to access resources. By introducing a focus on recognition in terms of resource distribution and institutional esteem, we also further help prize open the ‘black box’ of collective action in healthcare ( Geiger, 2021 ; Rabeharisoa et al, 2014 , p. 121; Vidolov et al, 2023 ).…”