Nora Kenworthy

Nora Kenworthy, PhD, is a writer, professor, and public health scholar.

Her work explores how technology, politics, and charity impact health.

2025 Andrew Carnegie Fellow

Nora Kenworthy has been named a 2025 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. This prestigious fellowship will support her work on polarization and solidarity in digital environments for health in the US.

Cover image of the book "Crowded Out." Cover features the title in white letters above a photo of a patient in blue hospital gown holding a phone. The phone projects the book's subtitle, "The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare" against a transparent picture of a dispersed crowd of people.

Crowded Out, Nora Kenworthy's latest book from MIT Press, is now available!

Crowded Out offers an eye-opening investigation into charitable crowdfunding for health care in the United States—and the consequences of allowing health care access to be decided by the digital crowd.Although crowdfunding has become ubiquitous in our lives, it is often misunderstood: rather than a friendly free market “powered by the kindness” of strangers, crowdfunding is powerfully reinforcing inequalities and changing the way Americans think about and access healthcare. Drawing on extensive research and rich storytelling, Crowded Out offers a unique and distressing look beneath the surface of some of the most popular charitable platforms, and the acute inequities users face there. Through these stories, Kenworthy seeks to foster thoughtful discussions of how we can better mobilize collective responses to healthcare crises.

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