ABSTRACT Like all forms of philanthropic and charitable practice directed towards people with health needs, crowdfunding does not occur in isolation, but is always entangled with other aspects of health subjectivities and health citizenship. I focus my response to the claims about crowdfunding investigated in this article by advocating for more attention to nationally situated and culturally situated aspects of both the technology and the neoliberal logics that drive it. I also discuss the question of autonomy, and whether crowdfunding can truly ‘empower users’, by pointing out the difference between whether it empowers users as beneficiaries or as health citizens. I suggest moving beyond a dichotomy (i.e., of whether it is empowering or undermining autonomy) to instead consider what opportunities, engagements, or affordances it may provide for health citizens in various national and local contexts, as well as for distinct patient, disability, or health communities. As such, I highlight the overall need for a more reflexive and comparative approach, to avoid the risk of theorising features of crowdfunding as universal without sufficient attention to situated or sociocultural factors; opening the possibility of more plural answers to core questions about what crowdfunding is and does.
Wardell et al. (Sat,) studied this question.