Connected margins

How do digital platforms both support and challenge the growing interest in alternative or esoteric practices? Online communities enable individuals involved or interested in practices that are generally stigmatized to exchange ideas and share knowledge, sometimes outside the realm of mainstream practices. This environment can thus offer practitioners new opportunities for professionalization by enabling them to promote their expertise to an audience that may become a client base. Yet these practices, visible through their online presence and the promotional efforts of those involved, can also arouse mistrust, generate criticism and give rise to controversies. Through several studies focusing on raw foodists, geobiologists, free-birthers, witches, and cartomancers, the articles in this issue show how the digital space serves simultaneously as a forum for interaction and the construction of knowledge, as a promotional space with a view to professionalization, and as a locus of controversy.