To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

Crowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical crowdfunding campaigns that were active during lockdown and chose to mention the pandemic. These pages pointed to interrelated biological, social and economic precarities, speaking to questions about how citizens navigate uneven needs during uncertain times. Findings showed that crowdfunders referred to the pandemic in order to narrate their own situation in culturally coherent ways and to establish context-specific relations of care. This included contextualising their needs through establishing shared crisis narratives that also made the infrastructural contexts of healthcare visible and performing relational labour in ways that aligned with nationally specific affective regimes. By highlighting their own vulnerability, crowdfunders strategically mobilised broader lockdown discourses of self-sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable people. In this way, New Zealand’s lockdown produced subjectivities both drawing on wider neoliberal moral regimes and specific to the nuanced and emergent moral systems of pandemic citizenship.

Construct and Priority Ranking of Factors Affecting Crowdfunding for Green Products

“…Specifically, on the demand side, crowdfunding for green products can quickly obtain and respond to the requirements of targeted and affordable consumers, while on the supply side, crowdfunding provides access for innovative companies to obtain required capital for the production and manufacturing of new green products. Moreover, crowdfunding has been seen as an influential business model during the pandemic [19][20][21][22].…”

Struggling, helping and adapting: Crowdfunding motivations and outcomes during the early US COVID‐19 pandemic

“…In low‐ and middle‐income countries, crowdfunders sought to secure access to scarce health resources during epidemic surges (Ebel, 2021; Espinoza, 2021). In more well‐resourced countries with fewer cases like New Zealand, crowdfunding helped navigate disruptions to other kinds of health and social supports during lockdowns (Wardell, 2021). In the US, a surge in COVID‐19 crowdfunding campaigns followed the identification of community spread in Spring 2020 (Cadogan, 2021; Igra et al., 2021; Saleh et al., 2021).…”

“…Nascent research on COVID‐19‐related crowdfunding has tracked its scale, geosocial patterns of use, outcomes, and to a limited extent, intended purposes (Bian et al., 2020; Igra et al., 2021; McKitrick et al., 2021; Rajwa et al., 2020; Saleh et al., 2021; Wardell, 2021). Early in the pandemic, Rajwa et al.…”

“…While the popularity of crowdfunding as a response to the acute exigencies of the US COVID‐19 crisis is well‐documented, little is known about what motivated people to turn to crowdfunding in such large numbers nor how crowdfunders narrated and explained their appeals for donations during this acute period of pandemic crisis. A notable exception is Wardell’s (2021, p. 3) exploration of COVID‐19 crowdfunding narratives in New Zealand, which she argues reveal the emergence of ‘new forms of biopolitical subjectivity’ focussed on ‘discourses of responsibility, vulnerability and sacrifice’. Crowdfunders in the US faced markedly different epidemiologic, political and social support circumstances during the pandemic, and we hypothesise that these conditions fostered different uses, motivations and discourses of crowdfunding during this time.…”

“…Nascent research on COVID-19-related crowdfunding has tracked its scale, geosocial patterns of use, outcomes, and to a limited extent, intended purposes (Bian et al, 2020;Igra et al, 2021;McKitrick et al, 2021;Rajwa et al, 2020;Saleh et al, 2021;Wardell, 2021). Early in the pandemic, Rajwa et al (2020) observed that US campaigns focussed on basic needs like food, rent and lost wages, whereas European campaigns supported health-care workers and facilities.…”