Postdoctoral Research
My current postdoctoral work tackles the institutionalization of patient stereotypes in medical education. My book project, The Performance and Pedagogy of Standardized Patienthood, is a cross-border examination of the history, politics, and pedagogy of the Standardized Patient Program (SPP) in medical schools in Canada and the United States. The SPP program, which began in 1963, enlists actors to roleplay the symptoms of several diseases and disorders, and to embody a range of personalities. This simulation is used to help improve the communicative practices of future healthcare workers, such as physicians, physiotherapists, pharmacists, and nurses. Focusing on the use of these programs for medical students and doctors, my research seeks to determine what can be learned from these constructed patient narratives, what changes can be made to improve patient representation, and how these changes might impact real patients’ encounters with future medical doctors. Building on existing scholarship on the SPP, which has focused on its assessment, its sociocultural impact, and the history of the program itself, my work weaves these threads together to identify epistemological and methodological weaknesses in the program and recenter its focus on the narratives of marginalized patients. My article on the rhetorical history of the SPP was published in Rhetoric of Health and Medicine in the summer of 2022, and recently received the inaugural Edwina L. Sanders Award for Outstanding Work on the Rhetoric of Health Inequities.
Doctoral Research
My dissertation, "Diagnosing Disparities: Unsettling Settler-Colonial Standards of Health and Normality in Canada and the United States," offers an interdisciplinary analysis of settler-colonial rhetorics of health and illness in English-speaking Canada and the United States, demonstrating how “otherness” and “abnormality” are often amplified or misrepresented in relation to a presumed norm of able-bodied white health. By interrogating specific instances of systemic racism and biases in medical practice and pedagogy from the early twentieth century to present, I illuminate inequalities in North American society that remain significant obstacles to healthcare. Diagnosing these disparities allows me to identify and challenge rhetorics of health and citizenship, while rendering clearer the health privileges associated with whiteness. What bodies are read as normal? How do medical norms create barriers to equitable healthcare? And how can we decouple these medical norms from institutionalized whiteness?
My research is both problem- and place-based: I focus on Canada and the US due to their geographical proximity, their settler-colonial legacies, and the white supremacy that has characterized both nations’ public policies. While politics, demographics, and healthcare models vary significantly between Canada and the US, I highlight some of the transnational strategies—involving eugenics, race science, physical education programs for national fitness, and print media propaganda—through which medical and governmental authorities have independently and collectively conflated white supremacist norms with health and citizenship.
My dissertation chapters build upon historical, rhetorical, and literary analyses. I deploy multidisciplinary methodologies to explore “normality” and standardization from various vantage points, and I consider the ways in which these ideas move across different discursive contexts. The rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) analyzes the impact of language and persuasion in health communication, medical encounters, and scientific writing. Combining RHM with postcolonial theory allows me to examine power dynamics that impact medical encounters in settler-colonial states. I draw on literary analysis to show how fiction and non-fiction can offer insights into the lives of marginalized people and provide counternarratives that critique the ostensible objectivity of scientific and medical discourses. Historicizing the changing conceptions of health and normality helps me contextualize and problematize contemporary medical practices as I examine the stereotypes and rhetorical subtexts of Standardized Patient Programs (SPPs) in medical schools.