Monograph Project: Medical Justice in the Digital Age
I am currently working on my first book project, Medical Justice in the Digital Age: Patients, Providers, and Online Health Communication (under advance contract with Johns Hopkins University Press’ Health Communication series). This monograph, developed from my dissertation, examines how patients and healthcare providers use digital platforms to negotiate questions of evidence, expertise, and authority within contemporary biomedical healthcare systems.
Drawing on analyses of social media content and interviews with patients and medical professionals, this project explores how online health communication reshapes relationships among lived experience, scientific knowledge, and clinical expertise. By examining the rhetorical practices through which patients and providers share information, build communities, and advocate for new approaches to care, the book considers how digital spaces transform the ways health knowledge is produced, circulated, and understood.
Medical Justice in the Digital Age contributes to ongoing conversations in health communication, technical and professional communication, rhetoric, and digital media studies by examining how communication practices shape the future of healthcare knowledge-making and patient-provider relationships.
My Dissertation Project
I defended my dissertation, Evidence, Expertise, and Experiential Knowledges: A Study of Patients’ Communication Practices on Social Media, in 2024. This project theorized patient narratives on social media sites as expressions of technical and technological expertise.
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.
My dissertation was awarded the 2024 CCCCs Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication, the Coalition for Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CFSHRC) Presidents Dissertation Award, and the Computers and Composition Hugh Burns Dissertation Award.
Other things I am currently working on include...
🗣️ The Routledge Handbook of Social Media in Technical and Professional Communication, a forthcoming co-edited collection (with Jordan Frith and Michael Trice) on pedagogical, theoretical, and methodological interventions at the intersection of social media studies and TPC.
💬 A study on the use of coded language practices to navigate automated content moderation and share reproductive healthcare information and resources on social media.
💭 An analytical review (forthcoming 2026), with Morgan Banville, Emily Gresbrink, and Rachael Jordan, examining how digital tools, resources, and online communities shape the academic job search experiences of job seekers in technical and professional communication fields.