Content warnings: This article references important and difficult topics including domestic violence, abuse, sexual violence and self harm. However, this article does not discuss these topics in-depth. One sub-section of this article discusses suicide at length. This section is bookended by text in italics both introducing and appending the topic.

Hashtag Health Nation

I'm staring at an Excel sheet that holds 5000 tweets. They're not all unique tweets; sometimes I scroll through several cells of "today, for every tweet and retweet using #BellLetsTalk, Bell [corporation] will donate 5¢ to #mentalhealth initiatives in Canada. Join!" Other times my eye catches on a word like "suicide" or "fucking" and the scrolling stutters or stops. I'm pulled into the tweets that use all caps or too many exclamation marks: the people yelling into the void of cyberspace. When I read more carefully, I stumble over moments of sarcasm puckering the smooth skin of a corporate hashtag. This is the collective and collaborative digital life-writing text I have created, pieced together using Python, Excel and OpenRefine, to connect a communications corporation (Bell Canada), a social networking site (Twitter 1 ), and hundreds of (here, anonymous) authors that tweeted, retweeted, and favourited #BellLetsTalk on Wednesday, January 31st, 2018. 2

It's an interesting and incredibly complicated archive. The peppy energy of a car-wash fundraiser and saccharine clichés about love and healing crash painfully into tweets about exhaustion, insomnia, forgetting to take your medication, financial struggles, domestic abuse, and sexual violence. Generic claims about how mental illness "doesn't discriminate" sit uncomfortably beside tweets about gendered violence. Hearts and smiley faces punctuate the text, trying—and often failing—to make the overarching story uplifting and heartwarming. Instead, it's heartworming, burrowing into my body. I am relieved that none of the tweets I collected were authored by people I know. Still, I know many people who did tweet and retweet #BellLetsTalk, and their presence hovering around the archive—some brutally, vulnerably personal, others in the careless vein of well-meaning tourists—is a bruise. When I press on it, it hurts.

Bell Let's Talk is an annual mental health awareness campaign run by Bell Communications Company in Canada. This national campaign is cross-platform: for each tweet that uses the hashtag #BellLetsTalk, for every Bell Let's Talk video watched on Instagram or Facebook, for every text sent on a Bell Canada phone ("turn off imessage!"), Bell will donate five cents to "mental health initiatives." Bell has developed Instagram filters and Facebook profile picture frames for this initiative. Bell Let's Talk functions as a PR campaign positioning Bell as a caring corporation, provides exceptional advertising for Bell, and contributes to the project of national identity building. My analysis is based on the 2018 campaign.

In Robert MacDougall's comparative study of the development of telephone systems in the United States and Canada, he writes that in Canada, the Bell Telephone Company became "to some extent…an agent of national unity" (16). I want to connect this historical thread of nationalism in the development of communication technologies to Bell Canada's contemporary use of digital media to reinforce a particular image of national identity and belonging: one that is predominantly white, settler colonial, able-bodied, and cisheteronormative. "So keep talking, keep posting, and let's make a difference," announces Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a video featured on the Bell Let's Talk's homepage. Trudeau was featured prominently in the 2018 campaign, while numerous Canadian celebrities promoted the campaign and offered themselves as examples of overcoming narratives. Employing the head of Canadian government to promote a charity campaign foregrounds the currents of power and hegemony prevalent in what Eli Clare calls the "ideology of cure" (3).

As I stare at the forty-six personal testimonies on the Bell Let's Talk webpage, I am hyper-aware of the threat of electroshock therapy (ECT), institutionalization, and treatment without consent pulsing behind the smiling faces of cured Canadians. Twenty-three (50%) of Bell's personal stories include a positive experience with the psychiatric and medical industries, citing the value of therapy, medication, hospitalization, psychiatry, psychology, or a combination of these treatments. Still others celebrate the policing and prison industries. Emphasizing cure and overcoming rather than social justice and interdependency, Bell Let's Talk stakes a claim not only on the good Mad body deserving of citizenship and rights, but on the future of mentally ill bodies within a settler framework that seeks to "make a difference" by eradicating difference.

Bell Let's Talk uses Trudeau as a symbol of aspirational national identity, a position Mad and disabled people have long been told that we, too, can earn, if only we take our medication and accept the painful and demanding love of the settler state. This campaign promotes cure, apolitical self-care, and maintaining wellness and health (often explicitly to avoid absenteeism at work.) There is no mention of access, collective care, or disability justice, and certainly no mention of discrimination, sanism, or ableism. Behind Trudeau's white smile, the genocidal project of settler colonialism is carried out—we kill land, language, and lives; encourage the harmed to speak their pain so that we might listen, and then celebrate ourselves for the goodness of saving small pieces of dirt.

Turning toward the #BellLetsTalk hashtag itself, a constellation of feelings, objects, and practices emerged around the words "good" and "bad," highlighting the dominant ideologies of the campaign. Good: Bell's campaign, crying, sports players, people who have died from suicide, people who are good for your mental health, people, days, nights, things, times. Bad: mental health, cell reception, days, times, things. The most "good" object and practice were the Bell campaign and hashtag, while the most "bad" objects were time periods and feelings. While "good" is used here to assign moral value to the network (and its good, i.e., technologically and socially-savvy, users), "bad" refers obliquely to experiences of madness/mental illness. This brief analysis is intended to provide readers with an understanding of the overarching framework of the campaign: that mental illness is bad and needs to be eradicated, and that mental health is good and worth attaining, typically through positive thinking, talking to a friend, tweeting on Bell Lets Talk day, and/or psymedical interventions. Welcome to the #BellLetsTalk project of Canadian national mental health.

In #HashtagActivism, Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Welles argue that those who "have long been excluded from elite media spaces…have repurposed Twitter in particular to make identity-based cultural and political demands" (xxv), a claim I take up in my exploration of Mad/disabled networks. Nathan Rambukkana identifies these networks as "hashtag publics" (29), and while he focuses on the publics of race activism, the tensions brewing around #BellLetsTalk can also be suggestive of "the kinds of publics that do politics in a way that is rough and emergent, flawed, and messy" (29). It is important to keep in mind the different types of networks that are at play in these identity acts, some less visible (reading without responding; favouriting; retweeting) some more visible (responding, tweeting using the same hashtag), but all engaged in the production of online identity and community. While the use of a corporate hashtag is distinct from the creation of an activist hashtag, there is still merit in recognizing the way marginalized people intervene in dominant public conversations on social media. In this paper I explore the Mad/sick/crip counterpublics that emerged through #BellLetsTalk, drawing attention to individuals and communities that resisted, subverted, and at times explicitly critiqued Bell Canada and mental health charity campaigns more broadly.

Of the 5000 tweets I analyzed for this project, 912 were retweets (RTs) of Bell's official Twitter account @Bell_LetsTalk with no additional content, 220 simply stated "#BellLetsTalk," and sixty were RTs of celebrity spokeswoman and Olympian Clara Hughes. Of the users who did append their own sentences to the hashtag, the most recurring words included "rt" (1010), sometimes because I have captured a retweet; in other cases, users were encouraging each other to retweet. RTs are an important function of Twitter: not only do they denote another level and type of participation, but popular tweets rise to the top of the page and are promoted as the "Top" tweets. Less retweeted and liked tweets get buried and are harder to find. While Twitter users can select "Most Recent" as an organizing principle, the default is "Top" (i.e., most popular). It's also worth noting that the Twitter algorithm tries to predict what tweets a user will most likely interact with based on past interactions, a process which makes it less likely that users will encounter dissenting or unique utterances.

With almost twenty percent of the tweets dominated by Bell, the message of the benevolent corporation dominates. Users are encouraged to share and promote Bell, as well as to disclose their own experiences of mental and emotional distress, often in the form of overcoming narratives and expressions of gratitude. While the corpus of #BellLetsTalk tweets is primarily narratives of overcoming, self-management, hyperindividualism, and the moral value of tweeting, the messiness and discomfort of Mad/crip bodies emerge from under the glossy veneer of prescriptive wellness. Sifting through the dataset uncovers Mad/crip testimony and kinship. For many Mad and crip bodies, this type of activism, care work, community-building, and public identity performance is much more accessible than take-to-the-streets or other offline tactics (Al Zidjaly 2011; Hedva 2016; Mann 2018).

However, while some of these networks queer/crip the hashtag in disruptive ways, other performances of bad/Mad/sad re-enact troubling attachments to markers of the settler colonial project: whiteness, toxic masculinity, and nationalism. This article moves through these networks affectively from feelings of belonging along multiple axes of kinship to feelings of isolation and the avatars that struggle to disidentify with the networks that seek to claim them. This process can also be read as peeling back the layers of the hashtag, from the more easily accessible (and shareable, likeable) performances to the more submerged (and less shareable, likeable) performances within these networked publics.

Digital Research Methods

Networked Madness: Kinship and Belonging

Support networks were performed, created, and celebrated through the hashtag in ways that trouble the neoliberal individualism of the corporate campaign—even as they rely on a neoliberal social media corporation. #BellLetsTalk hashtag users shouted out to their friends (digital and physical), talked to other avatars, and thanked their friends and family members for being a part of their social support system. With twenty-one uses, "family" was a minor theme that emerged in the dataset, second only to variations of "friend" at sixty uses (including one use of "partner" as in "partner in crime"). While "friend" appeared unequivocally as a positive sentiment (marked by "greatest" and "best," or in some cases, mourned and lost), "family" was sometimes evoked as a support network and other times as a guilt-laden reason to not commit suicide.

Situating mental illness within a network rather than a single body highlights the interdependency of crip community. These digital identity performances can be understood as what Alison Kafer identifies as "claiming crip," which she describes as a tactic for family and friends of disabled people, "acknowledging that we all have bodies and minds with shifting abilities, and wrestling with the political meanings and histories of such shifts" (13). Similarly, Elizabeth Ellcessor highlights Sami Schalk's work on "'identifying with' the political project of disability" as a methodology of experiencing embodiment as a "shifting social location" (27). Choosing to identify with disability or mental illness and participating in the crip network destabilizes the binaries of healthy/sick, abled/disabled, and sane/Mad and makes these categories visible as shifting, unstable, and relational. When we look more closely at these articulations of Mad/crip kinships, different modes of kinship and belonging emerge along multiple axes of identity and distinct social groups.

This framing of disability as a fluid category (which it is) that intersects with many other embodied experiences (which it does) and is a state we will all encounter (which we will), trembles when encountering the hegemonic fury of the family. Following the threads of networked madness means following the ideology of heteronormative "good" families that care, support, and police their crip members. Always, we have to ask of the network: are we cripping the family, or normalizing the crip? While networked madness diffuses feeling and responsibility in a gesture towards queer/crip interdependency, it also risks reproducing the infantilization of Mad bodies over whom parents, psychiatrists, and the state often wield total control. If your disability is our disability, then we have a right to make decisions over that embodied experience—even when it isn't our own body. "Claiming crip" or "identifying with" can be used as tactics to re-imagine disability as a social and cultural category, but this must be done in tandem with the understanding that the individual bodies that compose the network have unique experiences that cannot be collapsed into sameness. Claiming authority over any group experience is always a tenuous and problematic project. Recall Sara Ahmed's ruminations on "happy families": "the happy family is a myth of happiness, of where and how happiness takes place, and a powerful legislative device, a way of distributing time, energy, and resources" (Promise 45). The association between "happy" and "good" that Ahmed interrogates appears in my dataset as a way of policing and disciplining Mad bodies, of telling us what not to do, and how not to act in our mentally ill bodies (in the #BellLetsTalk corpus: suicide is bad, performative unhappiness is bad, bodies that perform unhappiness are bad).

However, in the hashtag we also see family members celebrated as mentally ill role models and/or caregivers in ways that put pressure on the idealized "happy family" and the solitary unit of the mentally ill "bad" body. Users celebrating their relationships with their mom (3), dad (3), brother (3) and sisters or sisterhood (6) position mental illness as something that exists within and across generations and communities, rather than isolated within individual bodies. Here, mentally ill family members and friends are not sites of contagion to be contained in an institution, but members of a network composed of many different nodes through which sadness and anxiety and other bad feelings flow. Inviting us to imagine coming out crip to a parent or hearing a parent come out as crip, a few of the tweets crystallize a key moment in the visibilizing of mental illness, even as the burden continues to fall on Mad/crip bodies to disclose (Kerschbaum et al 2017; McRuer 2006). Again, however, this moment situates mental illness within a relationship rather than a single body, and perhaps brushes against the genetic legacies and intergenerational trauma through which pain is often inherited. The most radical element of these conversations is the diffusion of badness or madness distributed among a network of caregivers, rather than within a bad body. We also see these networks performed on Twitter through retweeting, favouriting, responding, and tweeting at other hashtag users.

These gestures towards community, sociality, and participation de-emphasize individual responsibility and self-management in favour of collective action and caregiving, reproducing the "networks of interdependency" (McRuer, Crip Theory 4) that Mad/crip bodies often model offline. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell write that "disabled people's openly interdependent lives and crip/queer forms of embodiment provide alternative maps for living together" (3), and crip theorists and activists have been arguing for a cultural paradigm shift towards interdependency over independency for years (McRuer 2006; Mingus 2010; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018). Returning to the emphasis on friendship in the dataset, I read these tweets as an acknowledgement of the limitations of traditional family structures and proof of queer/crip family. "Friend" and "sisterhood" implicitly introduce non-normative family models into the conversation and broaden the interdependent network from the nuclear family to include queer communities.

In this dataset, we see family used both as a disciplinary technique and an aspirational support system of love and affection. Family is represented as a site of safety and security, even as we see it also being used to produce guilt and shame. There were no references in the dataset to familial abuse. However, there was one reference to childhood sexual abuse, which suggests familial complicity. Celebrating and generating support networks through the hashtag is a form of community-building that invites Mad and sane, crip and non-crip bodies into potentially productive and generative relationships and may be a site of resistance to systemic ableism. However, the ideology underpinning these networks and the use of the frequently occurring word "family" uncovers a complicated relationship between Mad bodies and their support systems. I remember when getting help for my own mental illnesses meant compromise and making myself smaller: accepting being misgendered by health professionals, not performing the feminist killjoy for fear of alienating or losing my support system.

What do we sacrifice in order to be a part of the network?

What are the limit-cases of networked madness?

As we continue our excavation of hashtagged madness, we will hold these questions in mind, as they undoubtedly shape the corporate Mad/crip avatar. Moving deeper into the micro-communities of Mad/crip hashtag networks, I explore the ways in which membership in these networks is contingent on specific identity performances and often reliant on the exclusion of other marginalized bodies. The corpus includes:

1. feminine therapeutic networks
2. masculine sick publics with deep attachments to capitalist national identity, and
3. queer communities that keep company with ghosts.

Broken Networks: Mad/Crip Alienation

"Belonging" is a fraught and strange term, feeling, negotiation. Sometimes it requires self-sacrifice and other times it requires sacrificing our attachments to power. Networks—physical and digital—emerge around inclusion and exclusion. We may come to the social network for a sense of community and acceptance, but these experiences can also produce anxiety, alienation, and ambivalence. We can use digital spaces and practices like hashtagging to create therapeutic and activist communities, to support one another, to create "access intimacy," where I "feel like I can say what my access needs are, no matter what" (Mingus "Access Intimacy"). We also see belonging contingent on a variety of factors, from gender and race to Internet access, technological literacy, and even grammar. We see a struggle between the good avatar circulated by the corporation and the many misbehaving networks that use the hashtag in unexpected ways, and the limitations of these networks that rely on social cohesion by way of exclusion.

Networked madness in this case study typically maintains its attachments to 1) the family, 2) the conventions of social media networks and 3) the conventions of settler composition. Users retweet, favourite, respond. They participate in the creation not only of a single-authored statement but of a community. They participate in the production and reproduction of Twitter. These users also write in a traditional cohesive structure that generally adheres to conventional grammar, adapted to include acronyms, tags, and emojis. But what about the bad users who break the rules and break the network? Jennifer Pybus explores the affective value of social network sites that create economic value from user-generated content, arguing that "What is central, then, for a social network to function is relationships – affective relationships," adding that users log in "for positive emotional experiences" (237). However, examining Twitter networks more closely reveals the ways in which they produce a range of positive and negative affects. Communication processes coaxed through social networks can indeed foster relationships and communities, but at the same time also produce isolation and alienation.

This section follows the thread of alienation, looking for broken networks that interrupt the therapeutic communities mobilizing around #BellLetsTalk. Not all Mad/crip bodies are allowed into social networks. Not all exclusions are involuntary. Some of us exclude ourselves. We refuse to play by the rules of the game or the group. Where networked Mad/crip bodies and affects challenge the sanist/ableist discourses of neoliberal individualism, resilience, and overcoming, other bad avatars took to the hashtag to disrupt the formation of networks as imagined safe spaces, while still others were forcibly isolated. These articulations of hurt, anger, dissatisfaction, and loneliness register as refusals, breaks, and rejections of the kinds of belonging that were available to some, but not all, users. Ahmed writes that "Sometimes we have to struggle to snap bonds, including familial bonds, those that are damaging or at least compromising of a possibility that you are not ready to give up" (Living 88). Bad avatars use the #BellLetsTalk hashtag to rage, despair, and critique social structures of inequality, including self-referential criticisms of hashtagging and Twitter activism. These users more explicitly take on the role of the Mad/crip killjoy, killing the joy of the network, and distancing themselves from the presumed "goodness" of the network. In contrast to the dominant goodness of networked bodies and affect, some users deliberately embodied bad avatars who feel unapologetically bad.

Despite the first-person narration that is the default on Twitter, many of the #BellLetsTalk tweets are about other bodies rather than the self (although these automedial acts are still always self-performances), and users employ second tense of "you" i.e. "you are not alone." In the corpus, "I" appeared 561 times, and "you" 481 times; these pronouns often come together in the sentence construction of an "I" addressing a—typically, but not always, generic—"you." Furthermore, many first-person narrators discuss past experiences from a distance that almost feels like third person, perhaps because the immediacy has been edited out (i.e., "I was"). They are calm, grammatically correct, and use appropriate punctuation. This use of the second-person or a distanced first-person narrator are modes of making one's identity legible and consumable to a wide audience without alienating readers with emotional outbursts or sentence fragments. Bodies that are used to being criticized or dismissed as hysterical or crazy may have learned to be careful in how they perform Mad. These tweets or threads are the most coherent and the most accessible as autobiography: narrated digital lives. Linear, readable, rational. Maria Leigghio reminds us that "under dominant psy discourses and practices a person who has alternative experiences of reality, often pathologized as being 'psychotic' or as having 'hallucinations,' is disqualified as a legitimate knower because their experiences are interpreted within a modernist framework as a break from reality" (126). In order to become a "legitimate knower," and read as an authority of their own embodied experiences, Mad/crip bodies must imitate the quiet calm impersonal rationalism of Western psychiatry.

"SUCKS" "FUCKING" "shit": other users take a different approach, employing the immediacy of a first-person narrator whose text at least appears to be produced without forethought. Short, staccato tweets about exhaustion and insomnia (sometimes modified by an angry or frustrated "fucking") enact the feelings being communicated. The use of all capitals, swear-words, and lack of punctuation and adherence to grammatical conventions in several tweets signal a tonal shift away from the "good" articulations of mentally healthy/sick identity. This is another form of identity performance, one less coherent, less neat, less structured along a familiar narrative, but no less communicative. Through these guttural enunciations of hurt, anger, fear, and pain, Mad/crip users enact a queer/crip politics that includes the "refusal to cover over what is missing, a refusal to aspire to be whole" (Ahmed, Living 185). These avatars are not recovering, overcoming, or grateful. They refuse to perform happy or healthy. They kill the joy of the therapeutic network. These furious and aggressive tweets perhaps offer one answer to Johanna Hedva's provocative question; "How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can't get out of bed?" Their words are bricks thrown at the social network, smashing the tidy and exclusionary process of mental health community-building.

These screaming, swearing, misspelled, and at times nearly illegible enunciations demarcate the bad avatar from the good—the user who knows when to add a smiley face from the user who sees not a network but a void to shout into. If "happiness is attributed to certain objects that circulate as social good," these users become "alienated – out of line with an affective community – when we do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed as being good" (Ahmed, Promise 41). While networked madness destabilizes the happy/sad divide and attempts to wrench "sad" from its association with that sticky word "bad," angry isolated tweets that are affectively out of step with the hashtag perform alienation as a disruption and critique of the network. The objects of social good at stake here are the network and the social media platform. Networked madness, in all its wonderful messiness, remains grateful for these objects, happy for and with these objects. Expressions of gratefulness fluidly transfer from the physical bodies of loved ones to Twitter avatars to the very acts of tweeting and hashtagging.

Of the different performances of alienated madness, angry/angsty youth emerged as a distinct demographic tweeting along a theme: the critique of education institutions. However, this did not appear to be a gesture toward community-building, and the tweets are encountered as a thematically related but distinct set of criticisms and identity performances that perhaps deliberately evade identification with support networks. In contrast, other social criticisms—for example, of poverty and systemic racism—appeared very rarely and seemed to be isolated by users as punishment for trespassing on the settler space of hashtag wellness. In the process of un-networking madness, alienated Mad/crip avatars may be 1) actively seeking to disidentify from the therapeutic public with their claim to bad feelings and/or 2) forced into isolated discursive pockets or solo tweets because they do not enact an attachment to the network or locate healing within these spaces.

Delving deeper into the corpus uncovered a few isolated tweets that, while not deliberately attempting to subvert the politics of the network, were isolated because of their content. If critical youth seek to deliberately break the network, avatars of colour and poor avatars seeking to engage in social criticism were isolated by other users. The scarcity of explicit cultural critiques also suggests that more radically minded users were already alienated from the hashtag and did not find it to be an accessible and welcoming site for the kinds of digital identity acts they wanted to perform. These singular, isolated tweets point to the limits of corporate hashtagging and the reproduction of whiteness as goodness in colonial mental health campaigns.

One tweet referenced job loss due to mental illness, implying discrimination and pointing to the brutality of capitalism that bulldozes marginalized bodies, particularly disabled and mentally ill bodies of colour. Another tweet critiqued the lack of adequate disability leave. One tweet identified poverty and racism as barriers to accessing care. Looking for POC (particularly BIPOC, WOC, and QOC) in a dataset that is so glaringly, hurtfully white is tricky, and an ethically fraught practice for a white settler scholar. However, I do want to acknowledge that there were users—likely people of colour—critiquing #BellLetsTalk as being inadequately intersectional, and I do not want to participate in the erasure of these important and difficult identity acts. For example, in 2017, in direct response to Bell Let's Talk, Black Mad artist and activist Gloria Swain created the counter-hashtag #BellLetsActuallyTalk. 7

The Future of Feminist DH: Creativity & Care

This article laid out my creative and critical approach to performing crip feminist DH research by generating a multi-authored automedial text. This process protected the anonymity of users and turned away from venerating the individual "I" in order to interrogate networks, assemblages, and relationships. This tactic challenges the "neoliberal life narrative" of "the self-made man, and the empowered woman" (92 Tainted) that Gilmore laments, and turns towards interdependency, collectivity, and community. By protecting the identities of users, I also practiced an ethics of care for the bodies that compose our powerful, fragile, and dangerous social networks.

The future of feminist DH lies in creativity and care. I am attentive to the dialogues about ethics and methodologies that are occurring in informal Zoom meetings and formal conferences, that are mapped out in the edited collection Good Data, that are finding their way into footnotes or full articles. Our research is also shaped by innovation and invention: consider, for example Moya Bailey's work with the hashtag #GirlsLikeUs, and her emphasis on foregrounding consent, accountability, and collaboration (2015). Bailey's article imagines one way of ethically engaging with digital bodies and community partners. In the introduction to Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, Elizabeth Losh and Jaqueline Wernimont foreground "the tasks of intersectional feminisms, of coalition building, and of communal care and repair" (ix) as a critical direction in DH. The collection includes a range of creative approaches to doing digital scholarship. Creativity lives in both product and process, in our plans and the revisions we make to our research plans.

In 2018, I wrote a call for papers (CFP) for the annual Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship graduate scholarship. Our chosen theme that year was "System/Système D: Improvising Digital Scholarship." In the CFP I wrote:

System/Système D: to improvise, change, adapt. We use this term playfully to acknowledge the creativity, troubleshooting, and failures that accompany digital scholarship. Innovation and learning binds digital scholars together as we navigate uncharted waters with new evidence, new tools, and new questions. What does it mean to improvise within the field of digital scholarship? What challenges do digital scholars face and how can they be overcome? What can we learn from interdisciplinary approaches and how do we make the field more accessible to diverse voices?

I think about these questions when my laptop or PC crashes, when Python crashes, when my Python code fails, when parts of the data I collected are corrupted or lost. I think about pain. I think about access as a Mad/crip body. I feel fatigue settling under my skin. Each digital media project requires a different research framework and a different understanding of vulnerability, accountability, and collective care. Working with video games is not the same as working with a Twitter hashtag data set, which is not the same as working with Instagram, blogging, or TikTok, even as platforms, users, and audiences intersect and overlap.

I came to this project with a methodology prepared and then had to improvise, adapt, and create new ways of working with and through the barriers and affordances of digital scholarship; of embodiment; of time and energy and money. Feminists and disability scholars and activists are redefining what the study of digital media and mediated lived might look like, challenging digital humanists to be creative and inventive in our methods and practices, and encouraging us to think critically about how to perform our research in an ethical manner. Looking to the future, my hope for this field is that it continues along a trajectory towards critical reflection and an ethics of care, and that it shifts away from sane/able-bodied feminisms and towards centering the Mad/crip bodyminds—of researchers, subjects, and audiences (recognizing we can be all three at once)—in the methodologies we generate to perform and communicate our research.