Title: Assistant Professor

University: Marquette University

Email: lillian.campbell@marquette.edu

Twitter: @lillyvc

Description of your work

Within rhetorics of health and medicine, I’m interested in theories of materiality and embodiment, feminist rhetoric, genre theory, and technical and professional writing pedagogy. My current research focuses on how providers learn to communicate in the health professions and explores innovative educational methods for fostering ethical and empathetic communication. My dissertation project investigated nursing students in clinical nursing simulations and next I plan to conduct research with physical therapy students in experiential learning contexts. Ultimately, I’m working on developing a theory of rhetorical bodywork, which offers a means of accounting for the physical, emotional, and discursive training that occurs in experiential health provider education.

The sociological concept of bodywork describes “the labor performed on other’s bodies (and products from the body), emotional labor, and the effects of work on one’s own body” (Fisher 2009, p. 2669). I argue that rhetorical bodywork offers rhetoricians of health and medicine a way of conceptualizing the body’s role in health practitioner training that is well aligned with recent work on embodied training and patient embodiment. Meanwhile, this concept also emphasizes power relationships in ways that can be elided by material frameworks. It calls attention to who is allowed to perform different kinds of bodywork, how different individuals are expected to control their bodies and emotions, and how interaction with bodies can be a source of marginalization or prestige. 

My work is published or forthcoming in Composition Forum, Written Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Writing Research, Peitho, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, and the collection Interrogating Gendered Pathologies.