Publications
Sara's research has been published in Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, and Humanities, and is forthcoming in Literature and Medicine. She has been a contributing writer at Columbia University’s online health humanities journal Synapsis since 2019. Her short story “Google World,” was published in the anthology Friend. Follow. Text: #storiesFromLivingOnline.
‘Syphilitics,’ ‘Cell Lines,’ and ‘Hosts’: A Critical Investigation into the Rhetorical Dehumanization of Black Americans”
Forthcoming in Literature and Medicine, Fall 2025
This article investigates medical dehumanization in the US through the lens of health inequities related to systemic racism, sexism, and classism. I examine well known cases of medical exploitation in the stories of Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee Study; however, I revisit these examples through a new lens by undertaking a rhetorical analysis of medical journal articles written on them. I demonstrate how the genre of scientific writing, with its emphasis on objectivity and neutrality, mitigated concerns about the mortality of these Black Americans, and overlooked exploitation in the name of scientific research advancement. Grounding this conversation in contemporary race relations in America, I conclude with an examination of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a text that, in contrast to the scientific writing I examine, provides intimate insights into the lives of people who have been dehumanized by systemic racism and the emotionally detached personae of scientific discourse.
This image will be replaced with the front cover of the General Issue of Literature and Medicine in Fall 2025, following publication.
"The Politics of Standardized Patienthood”
Rhetoric of Health and Medicine 5.3 (2022): 308-334.
Winner of the “Edwina L. Sanders Award for Outstanding Work on The Rhetoric of Health Inequities.”
Standardized Patient Programs (SPPs) enlist actors to roleplay the symptoms of various diseases and disorders, and to embody a range of personalities. These simulations are used to help improve the communicative practices and professional competencies of future healthcare workers. Focusing on the use of these programs for medical students and doctors, this article establishes a kairology of the SPP to better understand the shifting terrains of patient representation. A kairological account focuses on "historical moments as rhetorical opportunities" (Segal, 2005, p. 23) and, in the case of medicine, illustrates how "changes in [medical] practice are importantly reciprocal with changes in the terms of practice" (Segal, 2005, p. 22). I trace the SPP through various linguistic iterations to reveal how the shifting language of simulated patienthood reflects different orientations towards medical pedagogy and patient populations at significant junctures in time. I conclude my kairology with an examination of the Indigenous Simulated Patient Program, a 2011 pilot program that has the potential to better represent and serve Indigenous peoples in medical pedagogy and practice.
“Ayahuasca on Trial: Biocolonialism, Biopiracy, and the Commodification of the Sacred”
History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals 63.2 (2022): 328-353.
In 1986, American scientist and entrepreneur Loren Miller received Plant Patent No. 5, 751 on a “novel” strain of the ayahuasca plant, which he named “Da Vine.” Indigenous tribes and healers had been using ayahuasca for hundreds of years before it was brought into Western culture. Miller’s accepted claim to novelty, however, was founded on this particular strain’s color and medicinal properties. Several years after his “discovery,” Indigenous peoples of Ecuador learned that their sacred plant had been patented and demanded that Miller’s patent be revoked for not meeting the novelty requirements of the US Plant Patent Act. In 1999, the US Patent and Trademark Office revoked Miller’s patent based on evidence of the strain’s existence in US botanical museums prior to Miller’s licensing. Subsequent to this decision, however, Miller filed for an appeal, and his “Da Vine” patent was reinstated for its remaining life span. This case demonstrates how international patent law reinscribes asymmetrical power relations between the “West and the rest” by deferring to a legal structure that remains inherently colonial in nature and practice. Beginning with a history of patent law, this paper examines Miller’s case as it disregards Indigenous existence, legitimizes property theft, and commodifies a sacred plant.
“Terrestrial Cosmopolitanism, Posthumanism, and Multispecies Modes of Being in Cereus Blooms at Night”
Humanities 8.92 (2019): 1-15.
Cosmopolitanism has generally been used to describe a philosophy that imagines all humans as citizens of a single “human” community. This article explores a terrestrial cosmopolitanism that challenges the colonial discourse of human exceptionalism by extending the democratization of people to include environmental bodies within their global context, replacing hierarchies with collectivities to reveal humanism’s underrepresented others. Examining interspecies alliances in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, I look towards terrestrial cosmopolitanism as an alternative to anthropocentric forms of cosmopolitanism that continue to reinscribe colonialist aspirations and ontologically exclusionary practices. Mootoo’s work decenters how we think about humans and the environment and offers a nuanced depiction of a positive interspecies community that resists harmful humanist taxonomies. Reading the novel’s protagonist, Mala, as a posthuman figure, I argue that her rejection of human language, in conjunction with her nonhuman interactions, positions her as a keeper of collectivity, as she creates a third space of subjectivity in her garden that blurs the boundaries between humans and nonhumans.
"Google World"
Friend. Follow. Text. #StoriesFromLivingOnline
Shawn Syms, Ed. Enfield & Wizenty, 2013.
This fiction developed out of my academic undergraduate thesis on Raymond Carver and the modern short story. My examination of Carver’s portrayal of human (mis)communication in the collection Cathedral inspired me to find ways to express unusual modes of communication in my own creative writing. In “Google World,” I tell the story of a disillusioned traveller in search of human connection and a sense of place. While searching for a hostel at an Internet café in Vietnam, the young man encounters an 11-year old boy who is equally unilingual, but with whom he feels the need to connect. The man turns to Google Translate to try to communicate with the boy. This social exchange offers insight into contemporary globalization, and the role of technology as it enables, confuses and represents what is lost and gained in cultural translation.
