michelle charette
My work explores the rhythms and tensions between bodies and technologies. I draw primarily on STS, phenomenology, and feminist theory.
My doctoral project examines the conditions and consequences of e-health approaches to chronic pain. From immersive serious games to symptom-tracking applications to facial coding systems that detect pain via patterns of expression, digital technologies are increasingly touted as capable of solving long-standing challenges to treating people with chronic pain. However, these tools introduce novel issues and questions about chronic pain, technology, and justice in medicine. My dissertation describes the emergence of digitality in chronic pain science, the ideological backdrop of this paradigm, and how technoscientific practices impact the lives of people living with chronic pain in Canada.
reviews & responses
Blog posts
Infographic Interventions (Mind Matters Blog)
Playfulness for Justice (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare Blog)
A Situated Neurology in Kenya (Mind Matters Blog)
Writing Life Series No. 5: An Interview with Robert Desjarlais (Somatosphere)
articles & Book chapters
teaching
The intersectional implications of a quantitative epistemology in pain care and research
Canadian Journal of Pain 2025, w/ Gabi Schaffzin
“Play!”: Combatting pathocentric epistemic injustice in chronic pain care
Qualitative Health Research 2024
Tracking Ambivalence: An existential critique of datafication in the context of chronic pain
Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 2024
“There is Nothing Fun About Pain”: A critical phenomenology of games for chronic pain
Philosophy and Technology 2024
Sensing the Afterlife: Multisensorial ethnography and injured minds
Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography 2024, w/ Denielle Elliott
Sonic Stories, sensory ethnogrpahy, and listening with an injured mind
Multimodality & Society 2022, w/ Liz Lima and Denielle Elliott