Danielle Stambler
PhD Candidate
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Description of Work:
My research examines people’s daily lived experience with health, technology, and wellness beyond medical settings. In order to do so, I draw on interdisciplinary theory anchored by rhetoric, which allows me to ask questions about how discourse, health technologies, and practice mutually influence each other in the broader, often commercialized, landscape of health and society.
In my dissertation project, I am investigating the impact of an employee wellness program’s (EWP) discourse and programming on people’s lived experience with food and wellness. My dissertation findings suggest that while the EWP promotes a model of food as part of holistic wellness practices, it mobilizes a biomedical framework of food as medicine, or diet as a cure for weight-related illness. Overall, my dissertation research aims to illuminate the ways that institutional discourse and technologies work together to shape ideas about health, bodies, and what it means to enact wellness in different spaces.
Beyond my dissertation, I am in the process of finalizing a study of premodern medical recipe practices with potential insights for the ways medical information is circulating during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am also involved in research groups conducting usability testing with an online medical intervention, studying discourse about the gut microbiome, and designing pedagogical models to help foster digital literacy. The thread connecting all of my projects is one that centers users and lived experience through consideration of texts/discourse (broadly conceived), practices, and bodies and material objects.
Socials:
@d_stambler