Producing a Worthy Illness: Personal Crowdfunding Amidst Financial Crisis

For Americans experiencing chronic and acute illnesses, fundraising through crowdsourcing websites has become a popular method to pay for the extraordinary costs of health care and medication. This collaboration studio grant examined these new forms of self-representation from the perspectives of public health, medical anthropology, and media and communication studies. The project established an innovative, interdisciplinary, multi-staged research study to investigate these questions. • Symposium: Crowdsourcing Care: Health, Debility, and Dying in a Digital Age, February 19, 2016 • Publication of study “Producing a worthy illness” by Berliner and Kenworthy in Social Science & Medicine, February 2017 • Widespread media coverage in The Atlantic, the Financial Times, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Marketplace Public Radio, CBC, Huffpost, and elsewhere.