Research Scope

Broadly, my research is dedicated to addressing community needs through an ethics of care framework, which critically examines how research enacts care through the scholarship we produce and invites community-engaged scholars to work with public genres (i.e. exhibitions, white papers, grantmaking) and participatory methods (i.e. photovoice and focus groups) to facilitate changemaking.

I view care as a heuristic to interrogate, critique, and reimagine how writing and rhetoric studies, as well as the humanities at-large, can be more ethical in research conduct and address the institutional practices and expectations that can harm participants, participant communities, and researchers. My work expands on the ethics of care in research and demonstrates the efficacy of a care-centered research paradigm in community health projects by delivering participatory approaches to advance public action (“Situating Care as Feminist Rhetorical Action”).

While community-centered research has assigned value to methods that highlight underrepresented stories and lived experiences, my research considers the potential harm those methods may evoke and invites researchers who rely upon story and lived experience to build academic theory to consider how those methods may unintentionally produce harm, especially when one’s research asks participants and communities to recount experiences of trauma (“Revisiting Research as Care”).

My scholarship advances the stance that research should be an act of care and expands upon prior community-centered research by affirming that while stories are an effective tool to amplify underrepresented knowledge-making practices and community experiences, the act of collecting, writing, and circulating those stories for academic knowledge production does not necessitate the research as facilitating care (“Research as Care”). Rather, care can only be accomplished when research is conducted with and alongside the communities and the participants the research seeks to care for, and I extend this claim to larger reproductive advocacy organizations which promote a rhetoric of care while failing to fully incorporate community member perspectives in their advocacy appeals (“Intervening in #Access2Care”).

Interdisciplinary Focus on Reproductive Health, Justice, and Loss 

My focus on care in research is largely informed from my studies on the lived experiences of infertility and recurrent reproductive loss in health and medicine (“A Dialogue on the Methodological Affordances”), which requires navigating a series of barriers (i.e., financial, emotional, and physical) to accessing reproductive care and alternative family building services (i.e., IVF, adoption, surrogacy). Specifically, my research critiques how Western sociocultural discourse privileges normative experiences of reproductive health at the expense of those who encounter reproductive loss and grief (“Rhetorics of Self-Disclosure”, “‘You Google Infertility and You Don’t See Me’”) and how persons experiencing reproductive loss create counternarratives to resist heteronormative discourse describing reproduction and conception (“Infertility as Counterstory”, “Queering the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine”). Additionally, this line of inquiry led me to publish on the embodied toll countering misconceptions related to infertility and accessing care to build one’s family – what I call “misconception fatigue” (“Misconception Fatigue”). I advocate that infertility must be situated within a reproductive justice framework which asserts the right to have a family if one chooses. My publications and special issue on rhetorics of reproductive justice influenced what is now a growing subfield in writing and rhetoric studies and technical and professional communication (“Amplifying Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice”, “Mobilizing Grassroots Rhetorics”, special issue on Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice). Further, my focus on reproductive justice also examines the impact of reproductive technologies on infertility and recurrent loss. For instance, many smartphone period applications (apps) and other wearable technologies promise increased user agency and empowerment through their use. By applying a critical feminist analysis to these technologies and their data collection practices, I argue for user caution and find that many engage in disempowering tactics through their data collection practices which allow for the commodification of users’ data (“Data our Bodies Tell”, “Tracing a Future Lineage for OBOS”, “Teaching a Critical Digital Literacy”). Further, this work on critical data collection offers connections to the writing, rhetoric, and technical communication classroom, which I have written about for the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Digital Rhetoric blog.

Infertility & the Circulation of Those Stories

Collectively my work on infertility and recurrent loss is influenced by my community engagement. Since 2014, I have co-directed The ART of Infertility, which is an arts-based storytelling project that uses visual and written narrative forms of artistic expression to make visible the rhetorical silencing of reproductive grief that, in turn, has produced barriers to fertility care and alternative family building options. As a resource organization, I facilitate art and writing workshops for infertility and reproductive loss patients to process their experiences with reproductive grief. As a researcher, I have developed and use a phased methodology to invite patient-participants to narrate their infertility experiences through their artwork (“Art-i-facts”). Today, the organization has over 200 pieces of visual art and narrative that I incorporate with my co-director into art exhibitions around the U.S. These exhibits center patient art-making as a rhetorical tool to translate technical, scientific, and medical experiences of reproductive loss into accessible mediums for non-experts to grasp, thereby raising the public’s awareness on infertility. The most significant contribution of my work with The ART of Infertility is my role as a co-editor of Infertilities, A Curation, which is a curated anthology of visual art, poetry, and personal essays.

Future Projects

Currently, I am working on my next book-length project which considers the implications of the 2024 Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on embryonic personhood and its impact on access to family building technologies like in vitro fertilization and donor gametes. This project emerges out of a collaboration with EM•POWER, an HHS grant funded organization providing mental health support and counseling to donor embryo families. While non-genetic families created through adoption have a shared lexicon to describe their “alternative” family structure (i.e. birth mother or birth father), those families who rely on donor egg, sperm, or embryo (i.e. donor gametes) to create a family do not share a lexicon. Adding to this complication is that many individuals with remaining embryo/s after a successful fertility cycle frequently do not make a disposition (i.e. discard, donate, keep frozen) decision. This lack of clinical and psychological guidance with how to describe their alternative family structure and genetic origins is often cited as a reason to postpone decision making related to embryo donation. This book project, titled Embryonic Personhood Post-Roe: How Pro-Family Rhetoric Influences Family Building uses a mixed-methods approach to overview the rhetorical complexities informing equitable access to reproductive technologies. In particular, the book details the challenges that language creates when families consider using or donating embryos/s, the linguistic variations that families develop to describe their family formation and non-genetic relationships, and the additional complications these decisions have today in a post Roe era. In this way, the book contributes significantly to issues of family formation, legal and advocacy rhetoric, reproductive rhetoric, and contemporary issues of reproductive technologies including data surveillance and reproductive policing. This interdisciplinary project offers significant contributions to the previously unexamined issues of how the language of alternative family formation (i.e., embryo donation and third-party reproduction) impacts fertility decision making, which I write about in new CDQ  article (“Community-Driven Concepts”).