Research Overview

Approach

How I think about health communication

My research draws on critical theory, discourse analysis, and post-structural frameworks to examine how power and knowledge shape healthcare communication. I am interested in the gap between how healthcare systems understand the people they serve, and how those people actually experience care.

At the core of this work is an attention to language — not as a neutral medium of information exchange, but as the site where assumptions about health, responsibility, culture, and belonging are encoded and contested. A clinical encounter, a public health campaign, a digital health platform: each is a space where certain kinds of knowledge count and others do not.

My methods are predominantly qualitative: I use critical discourse analysis, Foucauldian frameworks, narrative analysis, and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). I am drawn to what these methods make visible — the way a Filipino domestic worker with breast cancer navigates a healthcare system that speaks Cantonese and Mandarin but not Tagalog; the way an Indonesian migrant worker's cancer uncertainty is shaped by fears about what will happen to her body, and her children, if she dies in a foreign country.

I am also interested in the other side of the clinical encounter: in how healthcare professionals are trained to communicate — and how simulation, narrative medicine, and reflective practice can develop the communicative skills that biomedical training rarely teaches.