Research abstract:

Online communities, created and sustained by people sharing and discussing texts on the internet, play an increasingly important role in social health movements.

In this essay, we explore a collective mobilization in miniature through an in-depth analysis of two satiric texts from an online community for people with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).

By blending a sociological analysis with a rhetorical exploration of these texts, our aim is to grasp the discursive generation of a social movement online community set up by sufferers themselves to negotiate and contest the dominating biomedical perception of their condition.

Generating a Social Movement Online Community through an Online Discourse: The Case of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, by Olaug S. Lian, Jan Grue in Journal of Medical Humanities, published online 8 April 2016.  pp 1-17