Beyond the Clinic. Expertise and Experience in Content Creators’ and Audiences’ Interactions around Women’s Reproductive Health on Social Media

Research Project, 2026 – 2029

This project aims to contribute new knowledge into how the entanglement of expertise and experience, as well as the intimate and the public, is re-negotiated and transformed within interactions between, and among, content creators and audiences in the realm of women’s reproductive health on social media.
Health communication is today digitalized, and social media plays an increasingly significant role in how people learn about their bodies and health. Research in gender studies demonstrates the visual and discursive positionings of women’s embodiment on social media and problematizes transformations of expertise in health movements in relation to patient support and community building. However, knowledge on how digitalized information about women’s reproductive health on social media is perceived, negotiated, and managed from the perspectives of content creators and audiences is lacking.Utilizing theories from gender studies, sociology, and critical medical humanities and combining qualitative in-depth interviews with the “scroll-back method” – i.e. the researcher and participant "scroll back" through the participant’s social media history – the project conducts a rich and reflexive analysis. Drawing on the research team’s experience in studying women’s reproductive health from the perspective of professionals and patients, the project demonstrates how knowledge about women’s reproductive health can be conceptualizes and problematized in an era of “digitalized health”.