Embedded Files
I am a rhetoric and writing researcher who uses qualitative methods to understand and interrogate the relationships between knowledge, authority, and equity in technical and scientific contexts. My research draws from the theories and methodologies across technical and professional communication, health and medical rhetorics, digital rhetoric, and feminist studies.
I am a rhetoric and writing researcher who uses qualitative methods to understand and interrogate the relationships between knowledge, authority, and equity in technical and scientific contexts. My research draws from the theories and methodologies across technical and professional communication, health and medical rhetorics, digital rhetoric, and feminist studies.
As a scholar, my research practices are rooted in ideals of respect, collaboration, and reciprocity and coalesce around issues of inequitable healthcare outcomes and experiences for minoritized patient populations.
As a scholar, my research practices are rooted in ideals of respect, collaboration, and reciprocity and coalesce around issues of inequitable healthcare outcomes and experiences for minoritized patient populations.
About My Dissertation:
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.
My dissertation has been awarded the 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.
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, Medical Justice in the Digital Age: Patients, Providers, and Online Health Communication, 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.
Stay tuned for more updates on this project!
Other things I am currently working on include...
💉 An article on how social media users leverage different discourses about the purpose and values of COVID-19 vaccination, forthcoming in a special issue on permission structures in Technical Communication and Social Justice.
🔒 A co-authored data privacy toolkit (with Morgan Banville and Emily Gresbrink) designed to help patients navigate digital consent and data-sharing practices in healthcare settings.
💬 A study on the use of coded language practices to navigate automated content moderation and share reproductive healthcare information and resources on social media, which I’ll present at the ACM SIGDOC conference in October 2025.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse