Affective Resonance and Durability in Political Organizing: The case of patients who hack

• Published in: Organization studies 2023-09, Vol.44 (9), p.1413-1438
• Main Authors: Vidolov, Simeon, Geiger, Susi, Stendahl, Emma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: affect theory; affective dissonance; affective resonance; Chronic illnesses; Chronic pain; Community; Diabetes; Economic change; Emancipation; Health care; healthcare movements; Objectives; Organization studies; patient entrepreneurship; political organizing; social movements; Transformation
• ISSN: 0170-8406; 1741-3044; 1741-3044
• DOI: 10.1177/01708406231162002

We explore the role of affect in fuelling and sustaining political organizing in the case of an online type-1 diabetes community. Analysing this community’s interactions, we show that the drive towards political transformation is triggered by affective dissonance, but that this dissonance needs to be recurrently enacted through the balanced circulation of objects of pain and hope. We propose the notion of affective resonance to illuminate the dynamic interplay that collectively moderates and fosters this circulation and that keeps bodies invested and reverberating together around shared political goals. Affective resonance points researchers toward the fragile and complex accomplishment that affective politics represents. Focusing particularly on the community’s interactions on Twitter, we also reflect on the role of (digital) resonance spaces in how affects circulate. By adopting and transposing concepts from affect theories into the context of patient communities, we further add important insights into the unique embodied challenges that patients with chronic illness face. Highlighting the hope induced by techno-bodily emancipation that intertwine into a particular form of political organizing in such healthcare movements, we give emphasis to patient communities’ deeply embodied affects as important engines for political, social and economic change.