Sarah Singer
Description of Work:
My research uses rhetoric as an analytical tool for examining public and professional scientific, technological, and medical discourses. I’m currently working on a book project, The Patient Empowerment Paradox, which investigates how Lyme disease patients are forced to be empowered and sometimes harmed by seemingly empowering healthcare practices. Thus far, my work has focused on chronic conditions and involved both rhetorical analysis and qualitative research methods. Extending this work, I’m interested in how patients share their health experiences, how those experiences become “data,” and who benefits from these sharing practices. To that end, for the RHM symposium workshop, I’ll be sharing a portion of a new project about online patient data registries. While rhetoricians have studied the ethical issues around corporate data-gathering and use (De Hertogh, 2018; Hutchinson and Novotny, 2019), I will examine how scientific journal articles frame these anonymized contributions, highlighting how digital patient repositories offer possibilities for both revealing and masking patients’ labor. Ultimately, this article will ask: What rhetorical moves do scientists make to account for patients’ data “ownership” and how do they reshape our understanding of chronicity?
Socials:
@__sarahsinger
sarah.singer@ucf.edu