Building on an ethnographic fieldwork on Lyme disease in Poland and across the Polish-speaking Internet (2020-2024), this talk unfolds the social and cultural specter of controversies surrounding Lyme borreliosis. While some issues related to the disease are a matter of medical disputes, most stem from the complex systemic malfunction in healthcare, pharmaceutical production as well as media involvement in public education of infectious diseases. Bringing empirical examples forward, I showcase how both patients and medical professionals navigate this reality, referring to an original concept of the new public care, a term that describes the informal grassroots system of health advice, stretched across social networking sites, which in all intents and purposes aims to supplement the shortcomings of formal systems of care and health support.
Magdalena Góralska is an anthropologist working at the intersection of medical and digital anthropology. She specializes in research on socially contentious topics, such as GMOs, vaccinations, or Lyme disease. She has previously studied and written about populism in Central and Eastern Europe and the healthcare crisis in Lebanon. A graduate of the University of Warsaw, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, and the University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute. She worked and taught at UCL, Rutgers University, Jadavpur University and Hans Bredow Leibniz Institute for Media Research in Hamburg. More details on her work: https://magdalenagoralska.org/
Room 1.02
Daniel Kontowski