Title: Professor of Writing and Rhetoric
University: University of Central Florida
Email: bscott@ucf.edu
Description of your work
My project examines the continued rise of prescription drug micro-influencers and the marketing support that enables their work (talent agencies, UGC platforms). I connect this phenomenon to broader profit-driven efforts to leverage consumer/provider perspective and advocacy, and to populist arguments about empowering patients with information and access on their own terms (another example is the Right to Try movement). Among other effects, micro-influencing and arguments supporting it challenge healthcare regulation and have the potential to compromise patient safety, for example through promoting off-label drug use (Kessler; DeTora). Critiquing the arguments promoting and linked to micro-influencers can help stakeholders further consider risks to patients and, for rhetoricians more broadly, the rhetorical (and neoliberal) processes by which patient concerns are co-opted for corporate ends.