This collaboration studio grant examines health-related fundraising through crowdsourcing websites from the perspectives of public health, medical anthropology, and media and communication studies.

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.


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