As a community-engaged scholar, my research collaborates with communities. I believe that interventional scholarship requires collaborative partnerships amongst scholars, communities and the people whom they advocate for. This position is informed from my own infertile identity and participation with infertility advocacy organizations.

Frustrated by the predominant silence and stigma of infertility, I became determined to not only openly discuss my experiences with infertility but encourage other infertile women and men to do the same. Committed to the need to talk about infertility and the ways in which infertility re-orients one’s understanding of their body, their fulfillment of cultural expectations and their personal desires, I founded a peer-led support group for infertile individuals to begin sharing their experiences. The support group is organized through RESOLVE: The National Infertility Organization. Additionally, I have participated in Advocacy Day, a RESOLVE event where the infertility community comes together in Washington, D.C. to lobby for the mandate of national health insurance. I am also a member of the Building Families Alliance of WI.

Participation in infertility advocacy work is directly tied to my affiliation with The ART of Infertility, a play on words for ‘assisted reproductive technology’, is an international art, portraiture and oral history project, and traveling art exhibit. Founded in 2014 by three women experiencing infertility (Elizabeth Horn, Robin Silbergleid, and myself), the organization has conducted over one hundred interviews, curated innovative art exhibits, hosted writing and art workshops, and maintained a blog and social media presence in the infertility community. Through all these activities, we explore how individuals represent their experiences with infertility through creative outlets such as writing, art, or other multimodal means. Several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters (in fields such as the medical humanities, technical communication, and rhetoric) have been published on the significance of the work conducted by this organization. In 2023, we published Infertilities, A Curation (Wayne State University Press) which makes visible the emotional depths of infertility and reveals that infertility cannot be reduced to a singular narrative; instead, it is an assemblage of multiple embodied moments.

The ART of Infertility’s mission is to break the silence around the experiences of infertil­ity, offering art and storytelling as therapeutic heuristics to capture and express the realities, pains, and joys of infertility. This project recognizes the diverse voices and per­spectives that represent infertility – ranging from those in a heterosexual relationship who receive an infertility diagnosis upon trying to conceive, those who identify as single-mothers-by-choice and undergoing fertility treatment to become pregnant, and those who identify as LGBTQ+ and encounter many of the same infertility decisions. In this way, the project attempts to speak back to dominant perceptions and assumptions of who is infertile. Our goal in doing so is to broaden the public’s understandings of infertility, making the claim that infertility impacts far more than just the older heterosexual couple attempting to conceive.

In November of 2018, The ART of Infertility was recognized by RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association and received The Hope Award for Innovation. You can learn more about the award and why the recognition of storytelling is important when dealing with infertility in the video below. 

To learn more about The ART of Infertility, go to our website: www.artofinfertility.org. You can also see a small, virtual exhibit curated for National Infertility Awareness Week during April 2020 by clicking here.