Research agenda

My research interests intersect across medical rhetorics, Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), and digital technologies. Specifically, I am committed to investigating how technical texts and technologies drive routine production and network beliefs. My Master’s thesis on critical consciousness and cura personalis, care for the whole student, paved the foundation for my primary research in patient advocacy and human-centered design. One major question drives this area of scholarship: How do routine clinical documentation practices and networks influence patient quality of care and chronic health disparities? In addition to this research focus, I continue to produce pedagogical scholarship on writerly identity and social justice, research that brought me to the field of Writing Studies in the first place.

Investigating Notions of Chronicity via Patient Advocacy & Patient Experience Design (PXD)

My dissertation project, Charting Chronicity: A Thematic Analysis of Clinical Pain Assessment Tools and Patient Documentation Design is the first stage of a longer research agenda that explores how electronic scribing practices shape provider and patient experiences of managing chronic disease. Pain is the leading cause of disability and seeking medical care today. Widespread disparities exist for chronic pain assessment across race, gender, class, and sexuality, especially for female-identifying patients whose discomfort is often downplayed or dismissed. My dissertation study aims to answer the following questions: how does routine assessment documentation—across U.S pain and spine clinics—frame chronic pain and chronicity, and how might these technical artifacts contribute to assessment disparities? I argue that the content and design of assessment documentation assumes a kairotic ease of simplicity that masks the embodied, user experience needs of those living with chronic pain or other ongoing medical conditions. To explore how chronicity and the body in pain are framed across clinical documentation, I collected pain assessment scales and patient intake templates from pain clinics across the three largest U.S. health systems. I then conducted a thematic analysis on these artifacts, using the key rhetorical concepts of kairos (timeliness), chronos (quantitative time), and hexis, (one’s bodily state). I ultimately showcase the need for assessment documentation to adopt a feminist application of Meloncon’s (2017) Patient Experience Design (PXD) framework to better account for patient experiences of chronic pain.

This project has already paved a platform for future work on chronicity and clinical documentation practices. Currently, my article “One Size Does Not Fit All: How Clinical Pain Assessment Scales and Tools Mask Narratives of Chronicity” is under review at the Journal of Technical and Professional Communication. Another in-progress publication that stems from my Phase 2 results, “Mapping the Body in Pain: Accounting for Hexis and Western Conceptions of Wellness in Patient Intake Documentation,” will be sent to a medical rhetorics journal this year. Overall, my dissertation lays the foundation for an upcoming book where I will:

1. Identify how the design and interface of electronic health records (EHRs) influence pain recording practices and provider perceptions of chronicity.

2. Provide actionable recommendations to enhance clinical scribing practices from feminist PXD and critical disability studies approaches.
   
   

This work sets me up for an ongoing project for the next three years that investigates how patients experience and make sense of chronicity via patient documentation practices (care team pamphlets, patient education materials, and EHR recording methods).

Enhancing Rural Healthcare Communication Networks & Clinical Technologies via Narrative Medicine

I have begun similar patient advocacy empirical work with my involvement in a regionally-funded project, “Enhancing Rural Healthcare by Incorporating Generative AI and Machine Learning: Building Stronger Communication Networks.” This project identifies the current communication challenges faced by rural healthcare clinics in North Central United States, particularly in Indiana, where geographic isolation, financial constraints, and limited resources have contributed to practitioner burnout and rural health disparities. Phase 1 of this study involved surveying and interviewing rural healthcare providers to reveal their daily provider-to-provider and provider-to-patient communication challenges. Overall, these practitioners face inefficient communication networks and generic forms of patient education that do not align with the needs of rural clinics and patient populations.

Phase 2 of this study will involve developing rhetorically driven strategies in which generative artificial intelligence can be used to increase the bandwidth of medical staff and improve communications between providers and patients. This spring, my research team and I will start developing a locally built AI prototype that can tailor patient educational materials to better suit the contextual needs of patients with prompting from medical staff. This project has currently received $90,900 from regional and university affiliated grants, and has initiated a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant proposal: “Revitalizing Rural Healthcare in the Age of Generative AI: Mitigating Algorithmic Sociopathy with Narrative Medicine”—083024b. The main objective of this larger project is to explore how the integration of medical narrative techniques could enable healthcare providers to use GenAI for a more empathic and phronetic approach to patient care, particularly in areas such as active listening, enhancing provider-patient empathy, and identifying potential risks in AI-supported diagnoses and prescriptions. My main contribution to the project is the grant proposal’s narrative medicine angle.

Exploring Authenticity, Ethics, & Inclusion Across Writing Pedagogy and Administration

As a teacher-researcher, I am committed to elevating inclusive pedagogical approaches and the ethical use of digital technologies. My most recent publication, “Rhetorics of Authenticity: Ethics, Ethos, and Artificial Intelligence” (Deptula et al., 2024) in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication examines authenticity when using language models (LLMs) to compose TPC documents. By using an Aristotelian understanding of ethos, my co-authors and I argue that LLMs offer three affordances for students and TPC instructors: developing outlines for commonplace genres, transforming line-level prose into clear writing according to readability standards, and ensuring grammatical and mechanical correctness. However, the formulaic use of genre by LLMs to outline texts lacks phronesis (practical wisdom), surface-level stylistic markers undermine the arete (excellence or virtuousness) of writers and their texts, and mechanical and grammatical correctness diminishes social and cultural eunoia (goodwill) in favor of conformity. I specifically advanced the article’s sections on genre and plain language, particularly the claim that generative AI tools will likely tend toward the erasure of linguistic diversity. Building on this concept of authenticity, I am currently involved in a cross-institutional collaboration that seeks to address whether U.S. writing instructors can accurately differentiate between synthetic (AI-generated) and authentic (student-written) proposals without contextual cues. Proposals, across Writing in the Disciplines (WID), present a promising avenue for empirical research because they require both persuasion and originality. This project will identify the major strategies participants used to distinguish between these texts and offer new insights into instructional expertise, effective assessment practices, and teaching authentic prose in professional contexts.

Outside of studying digital technologies within the classroom, my initial research in liberatory pedagogy has spurred my commitment to inclusive pedagogy and writing program administration. My engagement with Purdue’s Antiracist Writing Pedagogy Group has initiated a group written publication “Creating and Sustaining an AntiRacist Pedagogy Group in Technical and Professional Writing,” which is currently accepted at Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. In my written portion of the article, I emphasize the importance of integrating a distributed leadership model and acknowledging instructional emotional labor to advance social justice initiatives within a writing program. I also provide a brief overview of how I redesigned two professional writing assignments in my business and healthcare writing courses to further embed principles of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA) into the curriculum. I plan to continue this pedagogical scholarship, more broadly, by investigating student perceptions of well being and inclusion, in addition to how WPA’s can account for the emotional labor and well being of their staff.

Ultimately, my scholarship in patient advocacy and inclusion will shed light on how the design and infrastructure of routine networks, documentation practices, and technologies can lead to structural change. By integrating critical insights from medical rhetoric and Technical and Professional Communication, my research seeks to empower patients, providers, and institutions to advocate for transformative practices that tackle chronic health disparities and improve the overall patient quality of care. Additionally, exploring authenticity and DEI in writing pedagogy and administration will create a more inclusive educational framework that empowers diverse voices and encourages ethical engagement with technology. These initiatives aim to enhance both healthcare and education, fostering environments that prioritize inclusivity and meaningful change.