Research

My research on infertility, reproductive rhetoric, and barriers to healthcare is a trajectory informed directly from my own experience with infertility and the embodied effects of biomedicine. It is from this embodied positionality that I have developed a series of research projects.

The ART of Infertility

This on-going research project was the basis of my dissertation titled, The ART of Infertility: A Community Project Rhetorically Conceiving Failed Fertility. This project emerged out of my collaboration with The ART of Infertility, which is a community art, oral history and portraiture traveling exhibit using art as a visual method to spur infertility advocacy. In this dissertation, I argued for a “research as care” methodology where bodies of health and medicine become participants actively constructing their narratives—both in academic research and in community health advocacy projects. I enacted this methodology by interviewing three self-identified infertile artists who previously donated pieces of their art to The ART of Infertility. My research participants demonstrated that art, as a form of multimodal composition, serves as an effective tool for processing infertility as an invisible and stigmatized identity.  Additionally, participants noted how composing their infertility stories through artwork allowed them to share and more effectively communicate their struggles to conceive with others. All three participants spoke to the potential that art serves in reorienting others, who may never face difficulty conceiving, to the experience of infertility. This work contributes to rhetoric and composition, speaking to the potential of community engaged rhetorical scholarship in topics of health and medicine as well as the application of multimodal composition in marginalized health communities and technical communication. Further, this work yields interdisciplinary contributions to fields such as art therapy, medical education, women’s and gender studies and art education.

I continue to co-direct and co-curate this arts-based organization and host art exhibits around the U.S. and internationally as a public pedagogy practice. I believe that art can be a transformative tool to tell triggering, stigmatized stories of health – like reproductive loss. While my dissertation project interviewed patient artists for this project, the next phase of this project is to begin interviewing and surveying viewers of the art exhibit. In doing so, I seek to discover how art exhibitions may translate technical communication in a decolonial framework.

Digital Archive: Mapping Infertility Advocacy

Of the 200+ of art collected from patient artists around the U.S. and world, a further research project in the early stages is to create a digital and public archive of the 200+ pieces of art collected for exhibit. Drawing inspiration from interactive maps, like RhetMap, I plan on creating an interactive digital storytelling map that links to individual pieces of art and their corresponding narrative label. The intention behind this map is to make accessible stories of barriers of fertility and family-building care to local legislators. Currently, fertility-related treatment is covered by insurance mandates in only 16 states. Making visible and accessible these stories across communities, and partnering with local and national infertility advocacy groups, will hopefully increase coverage and improve access to care.

PhotoVoice, Infertility, & Advocacy

A further project in my research trajectory is to explore the integration of PhotoVoice into ART of Infertility exhibit and the digital archive map of infertility. PhotoVoice, traditionally used in sociology, invites participants to become active documenters in the research process. I hope to design a future study that invites infertile individuals to document, via PhotoVoice, barriers they face – both medically and culturally – as a result of their infertility diagnosis. I plan to then incorporate this into both the physical ART of Infertility exhibits and the digital archive map.

Some questions informing this research trajectory are:

  • How might rhetoricians collaborate with communities to support their advocacy objectives?

  • What ethical dilemmas do rhetorical scholars encounter when working with marginalized or traumatized communities? (I’ve begun to address this question in a co-authored piece published in Reflections, which can be found here.)

  • What methods, both within the discipline and outside, may guide our research practices when working with advocacy communities?

  • How might we teach our students critical digital literacies to navigate growing technological surveillance and commodification of data?

  • How might we develop user’s critical digital literacies with health technologies that promise increased empowerment?  (I’ve begun to address this question in a co-authored piece published in Computers & Composition, which can be found here.)

  • How may decolonial methods and theories transform the types of healthcare stories circulated for advocacy?