Research
My research is situated at the intersection of technical and professional communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, and intersectional feminist studies.
About My Current Project:
I am currently finishing my dissertation, titled, Evidence, Expertise, and Experiential Knowledges: A Study of Patients’ Communication Practices on Social Media.
This project theorizes patient narratives on digital networking sites as expressions of technical and technological expertise.
This is a mixed-method, multi-year study of patient communication practices and draws from 21 participant interviews and a corpus of over a thousand posts across TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram.
Key Dissertation Findings:
Patients’ grounded experiences, intuition, and emotional insights confer medical expertise
These ways of knowing also expand notions of valuable clinical evidence beyond quantitative testing and provider evaluation
Efforts to share these experiential knowledges on social media can move us towards a more justice-oriented model of healthcare delivery
Given pervasive beliefs regarding women’s weakness, hysteria, and thus medical inexpertise, alongside the general lack of credibility afforded to user-generated social networking sites, this project explicitly focuses on women’s social media content to reveal how health communication practices are also shaped by gender alongside other facets of identity.
Other Research:
Drawing from my work as a technical and research writer with Lex End Homelessness, a homelessness intervention and prevention campaign based out of Lexington, Kentucky, other research focuses on the role of narratives in effective crisis communication practices and the role of interface design in fostering housing equity and access. Preliminary findings are available in the 2022 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm) proceedings and are forthcoming in a special issue of Technical Communication.