Danielle Stambler (she/they)

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 how an institution and its employees enact food, wellness, and bodies through discursive and material practices, and how those enactments are made meaningful. I argue that the EWP both arose out of overarching ableist, racist, and classist systems and replicates those systemic issues through its programming. I found that while the EWP talked about food as part of holistic wellness, for budgetary reasons relating to reducing healthcare costs, it enacted “healthy eating” in ways that reproduced a medical model of the ideal body as able-bodied and positioned the risk of future disease/disability as something in need of treatment. 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 have studied early modern English recipe writing practices as a form of tactical technical communication, and am currently involved in research groups studying discourse about the gut microbiome, examining user experience with COVID-19 vaccine finding websites, 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.

Contact: stambler@umn.edu | @d_stambler (Twitter) | http://daniellestambler.com