My current research areas are united by an interest in how evidence is a social artifact that is shaped by social,
cultural, and historical contexts. Across my projects, I ask: who constructs evidence, how does evidence confer authority
to individuals and groups, and how is it mobilized by social actors? I engage these questions of evidence in three domains
including how: 1) medical providers negotiate evidence to make medical decisions within uncertain terrains; 2) social actors
use evidence to make claims about social issues; and 3) language is used in interaction to regulate marginalized people.
I serve on the editorial boards for the Journal of Health and Social Behavior and Gender & Society and have published my
research in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior,
Social Science & Medicine,
Gender & Society,
and the Social Psychology Quarterly.
Current Research
The Social Aspects of Medicine
Book Project - Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender
In my book, Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender (NYU Press, 2021),
I offer an intervention in how we understand the development of trans medicine and how it is being used to "treat" gender identity today.
Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, I examine how health professionals approach
patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new
medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural
norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, I show how medical providers’ lack of clinical experience and scientific research
undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers
are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty.
As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing
challenges to their expertise and, in the process,
have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself.
How Emotions Shape Health Decisions
Emotions shape how we think we should feel and how to make sense of everyday life situations. But what happens when we don't have emotion norms
to help guide us or when there are conflicting norms about how we should feel in certain situations? In another area of research, I explore the
consequences of conflicting emotion norms on health decision-making. In modern medicine, providers are expected to interact with patients from
both compassion and detachment. These two norms are built from different assumptions. As such, this work demonstrates how emotion norms shape
decision-making in unsettled periods and the challenging situation that medical providers confront in health decision-making.
Healthcare Experiences of LGBTQ+ People of Color
With colleague Ning Hsieh (MSU), we centralize how sexuality, gender, and race combine to create health disparities among LGBTQ+
people of color. Our work documents how existing health infrastructures perpetuate inequalities in health encounters. While our
primary interest is in health experiences across medical areas, we began this research during the Covid-19 pandemic and have also
begun to explore how intersectional forms of oppression matters in shaping marginalized communities' health encounters during public health crises.
Social Inequalities
Social Movement Mobilizations & Misinformation
Understanding how social science can be used to create a more just society has been a long-standing commitment of mine. An additional research agenda
in collaboration with Celeste Campos-Castillo (UW-Milwaukee), is on how social issues are framed in a way to provoke emotions, and the role of emotions
in mobilizing people. While social movement scholars show how framing a social issue in a way that resonates with people yields success, sociological social
psychology theories suggest that dissonance is a stronger catalyst. Using archival research from the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) campaign during the 1980s,
we found evidence that what we coined as frame dissonance was a compelling explanation for the failure of the ERA.
This line of research on framing has led to collaborative opportunities with computational social scientist Kenny Joseph (SUNY-Buffalo). The three
of us are collecting data to trace how the spread of online misinformation propagates to offline behavior. Leveraging our interdisciplinary strengths,
our work develops new computational methods and theoretical innovations to examine how political discourse in social media surrounding the 2020 U.S.
presidential election travels to on-the-ground mobilizing and messaging.
Language and Interaction
A side project that stems from my previous research on trans people's everyday experiences in social life reveals how discursive aggression – communication
that is used in social interaction to hold people accountable to social and cultural norms - regulate gender presentation. I explore how this form of communication
restores social order, is based in dominant language systems, and reflect expectations for how interactions should unfold. Gendered expectations come to life through
language, are delivered through discursive aggression, and become routine inequalities that people negotiate in interaction. I demonstrate the value of discursive aggression
as a concept to capture a pervasive, yet under-examined, feature of everyday life and a mechanism for how power is perpetuated in interaction.