Understanding DIY Health

All are welcome to join us for this seminar which is hosted by ISS. The speaker is Dr Kate Weiner (University of Sheffield). If you would like to join in person please contact Pru Hobson-West.

Understanding DIY health

• An online community of people with Type 1 Diabetes develop and share knowledge about how to make an open-source artificial pancreas system
• People in the UK buy an over-the-counter statin and foods containing plant sterols to manage their cholesterol levels
• Trans people in the US source their own hormone replacement therapy through sharing, purchasing online, or making their own medications
• Across the globe, makerspace/hacklab communities shift attention during the Covid pandemic to design, make and share knowledge about healthcare equipment

These diverse practices have all been described by scholars through the lens of Do-It-Yourself or DIY. As these examples suggest, DIY health is a broad and amorphous field of social science study associated with diverse social implications. It is sometimes equated with self-care aligned with a healthist, consumerist, neoliberal project of the self. In other scholarship, it is seen as having more egalitarian or critical potential, associated with a broader movement of participation in medicine, equitable access to healthcare, openness, and innovation beyond institutional and corporate science.

This paper aims to map social science scholarship on DIY health and provide a conceptual framework for understanding this. It asks: What does DIY health mean? What substantive topics and cases are discussed and how are they studied? What are the politics of DIY health? What theories or organising ideas are employed? What, if anything, is missing from this scholarship? Drawing this together, I will suggest a typology of DIY health which categorises DIY technologies/practices and links these with their broader social implications.