Title: PhD Candidate
University: UBC, Visiting Fellow, Harvard University
Email: sara.press@alumni.ubc.ca
Description of your work
What bodies are read as normal? How do medical norms create barriers to citizenship? My research offers a rhetorical rethinking of Anglo-colonial constructions of health and illness in Canada and the United States, demonstrating how “otherness” and “abnormality” are pathologized in contradistinction to a presumed norm of able-bodied white health. By interrogating specific instances of institutional racism and biases in medical practices and pedagogy from the 1960s to present, I intend to illuminate material inequalities in North American society, which remain significant obstacles to healthcare. Diagnosing these disparities will help me critique national rhetorics of multiculturalism and citizenship, while rendering clearer the health privileges associated with colonial whiteness—what I call “health citizenship.” While the term health citizenship is typically understood as a citizen’s responsibility to remain healthy for one’s country (Johnson Redden, Porter), this nationalistic accountability is troubled by class divisions offering different models of healthcare for differentially valued lives (Blacker, Metzl & Kirkland, Rose, Solomon). Of course, these models vary between the relatively socialized medical system in Canada and the more commercialized healthcare in the U.S. However, I read the bioeconomics (Birch, Tyfield) of health surplus and deficits as markers of inclusion and seek to understand how intersectional forms of oppression affect healthcare for the “non-standard” citizen.
With these sociomedical differences in mind, my work builds upon historical, rhetorical, and literary analyses, culminating in a cross-cultural investigation of Standardized Patient Programs (SPPs) in Canada and the U.S. SPPs enlist actors to perform patienthood and roleplay the symptoms of various diseases and disorders. This simulation is used to help improve the communicative practices of future healthcare workers, such as physicians, physiotherapists, pharmacists, and nurses. My focus is on the use of these programs for medical students and doctors. What can be learned from these fictionalized patient narratives? What changes can be made to improve patient representation? And how might these changes impact real patients’ encounters with future medical doctors?
When scrutinizing the complicated context of patient positionality in SPPs, it is important to consider who is writing these scripts, and who is being represented. Are disabled, queer, people of color writing cases about their own experiences? Or are able-bodied white people writing on their behalf? By rhetorically analyzing the scripts that posit patients’ profiles, I examine patterns in how future medical professionals are trained to read patients in specific, and often rhetorical ways. I consider how the pedagogical omission and misrepresentation of racialized and gendered populations reproduce power relations in medicine that continue to disadvantage minoritized groups. To work through these questions, I use interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches, which take into account the rehumanizing values of narrative and the role of rhetoric in both propagating and dismantling discourses of disease and discrimination.