Research Program

My research program is comprised of three interest areas: digital health and racial justice, mediated patienthood, and health policy activism. My research and teaching explore the intersections of these three areas.

Digital Health and Racial Justice

How should we pursue innovation in the world of digital health in order to equitably distribute its benefits to all? My primary area of research examines the design and deployment of digital health technologies with this question in mind. I am interested in understanding the social, cultural, and political dimensions of innovation in biomedicine. As part of this work, I mentor undergraduate and graduate students through my Digital Health and Racial Justice Lab.

Mediated Patienthood

What networked spaces, technologies, and media practices do patients use to communicate with one another about illness? My work in this research stream examines the media and technologies that shape patienthood today. My first book manuscript, Performing Health: Stand-up Comedy and the Neoliberal Biopolitics of Hope, where I examine stand-up comedy as an unexpected media site where norms about “good” and “responsible” patienthood are reproduced and contested, and  "Illness Narratives, Networked Subjects, and Intimate Publics," a themed issue of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience which I co-edited, offer illustrations of this research.

Health Policy Activism

As we look back on the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) as well as efforts to repeal it, how can the stories and illness narratives that patients and caregivers shared help us understand the experience of "health insurance precarity"?  My work in this research stream, which includes my 2019 article "Fight for Our Health: Activism in the Face of Health Insurance Precarity," my public-facing reader discussing health disparities in access to health insurance in the U.S. titled Fighting for Health Equity: Past, Present, Futures (2021), and my Somatosphere essay "Is Health Activism A Collective Responsibility?" offer illustrations of this work.