My doctoral research examined the experiential and normative dimensions of modern chronic pain care in North America. Through fieldwork in a chronic pain clinic and interviews with individuals living with chronic pain, it mapped how advances in pain management (apps, games) are shaping patient self-understanding and creating new forms of clinical authority. The empirical findings revealed that ambivalence, rather than enthusiasm or resistance, is a dominant affective orientation toward novel pain-management technologies, unveiling deeper existential tensions around measurement, autonomy, and illness. I argue that playfulness and creative expression can serve as tools of epistemic justice by opening new relational spaces between patients and clinicians. Pain research continues in my ongoing work with the Pain Commensuration Technology Lab, where we examine the ethical and epistemological implications of modern pain measurement. At the Everyday Ethics Lab, I also investigate the implications of conceptualizing chronic pain as a brain disease, including how health care practitioners believe the proposed Brain Disease Model of Chronic Pain will impact stigma.
Learn more about the PaCT Lab here
Learn more about the BDMCP project here
Pain, Datafication, and Epistemic Injustice
Alongside project-based research, I am committed to advancing methodological and conceptual tools for ethical collaboration in transdisciplinary research. Through Connected Minds, a $300M+ interdisciplinary consortium funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, I research frameworks for co-creation that help interdisciplinary and cross-sector teams articulate ethical goals, select appropriate participatory methods, and evaluate impact across multiple timescales.
In our recent pre-print, we draw on a scoping review of co-creation research to develop a set of conceptual lenses from STS for understanding and evaluating co-creation in transdisciplinary research.
Embedded Ethics and Co-Creation
A continuing focus of my work is the use of phenomenology as a conceptual resource for qualitative health research. Drawing on traditional, post phenomenological, and critical approaches, I study how illness and health technologies shape embodied experience and our ways of relating to ourselves, others, and the world. My research has examined these questions across chronic pain and technologies such as wearables, digital health tools, and extended reality (XR). I am particularly interested in methodological approaches that bring philosophical phenomenology into closer conversation with empirical research, including phenomenologically grounded qualitative research, which I am using in my current work on XR in clinical training.
I serve on the executive committee of the the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC/TCEP).
Phenomenology