The shape of cancersocialisation and visual representations of the illness on Instagram

Resumo

(EN) Social media platforms like Instagram are a source of information and support for cancer patients. On this platform, millions of images shared by patients, organisations and the general public give shape to the social imagination of one of the most feared illnesses around the world. This thesis proposes a method to identify and obtain images of cancer from Instagram, a social media that in 2022 remains nearly inaccessible to research. Through a transdisciplinary lens, it combines the sociology of everyday life, visual sociology and methodologies from social media analysis to discover visual patterns in the images and find alternative discourses. The results show the variety of visual resources that patients use to communicate their illness and support the construction of their identity. They also show how Instagram’s economy of affection favours the publication of positive images, aligned with the discourse of survivorship, while they hamper the expression of other experiences.