Epistemic Activism and Depressed Selfhood: A Digital Ethnography of Twitter Content

Building on literature around neurochemical selfhood, the project presented in this workshop uses a digital ethnography of Twitter posts to explore depressed selfhood and epistemic activism in digital spaces.

How do people understand their depression? How do Twitter users make knowledge claims about the nature of depression? How is neurochemistry used (or not used) to narrativise the depressed experience(s)? Are digital spaces allowing for new psychiatric onto-epistemologies, reinforcing old ones, or something different entirely?

In this workshop, Courtney will flesh out some of these questions, explore her methods (and some of the challenges posed), share her findings, and hopefully – provide a few answers too. Courtney will also give a brief outline of her PhD project (commencing September 2019) which looks at how Doctors learn to prescribe, focusing particularly on the ideological function of Evidence-Based Medicine.

About the speaker: 

Courtney is an ESRC funded PhD student and activist at the University of Exeter. She is also a Director of Action to Prevent Suicide, a Devon based organisation providing suicide awareness and first aid trainings both within Devon and beyond. Her research interests lie within the Sociology of Health and Illness, Anthropology of Biomedicine and STS - with a focus on feminist epistemologies, what gets to count as evidence, radical psychiatry, and illness narratives.

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