Research
My research is situated at the intersection of technical and professional communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, and intersectional feminist studies. Through this, I explore how marginalized communities use available technical and rhetorical means to enact change in their local and online communities.
Whether I'm working with individuals experiencing homelessness or chronic illness patients, my research is rooted in ideals of respect, collaboration, and reciprocity.
About My Current Project:
I recently defended 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 20 participant interviews and a corpus of over a thousand posts across TikTok, Twitter (X), and Instagram.
Key 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.
What's next?
I am currently working on extending my dissertation into a book project, which explores how coalition for medical justice are built and maintained within a biomedical healthcare framework. This project enriches my dissertation's data with a broader textual corpus of digital content and interviews with medical providers, who, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been using social media for healthcare communication practices in increasing numbers.
This project offers an understanding of how this demographic conceptualizes evidence and expertise, particularly as it pertains to efforts to increase medical equity for marginalized and underserved patient populations, and how these different perspectives open up, rather than constrain, opportunities for theorizing and enacting equitable, sustainable, and inclusive models of knowledge-creation and healthcare delivery.
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 mitigating crises scenarios, such as housing instability and pandemics. Findings from this research are available in a 2023 special issue of Technical Communication on interface design and the 2022 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm) proceedings. Further research is currently under review.