My research

I am a discourse analyst and interactional sociolinguistic primarily studying health discourses and health interactions. My primary research project is about how health care providers and patient with chronic pain talk about the body, illness, and medical treatment, using clinical consultations and research interviews to answer this question.

IAS Fellowship

I study how health care providers and patients with chronic pain talk about the body, illness and medicine/treatment in pain clinic consultations. Among other things, this has yielded a study on the metaphors that health providers and patients use to discuss the physical, psychological, and social experience of pain.

I aim to dedicate my stay to the project’s dissemination work package, and in tandem with that, new research on what it means to take complex scientific insights into equally complex contexts outside of academic environments. The metaphor paper would be the main starting point: I am currently setting up a collaboration with artist Octavia Roodt to turn the spoken metaphors we found into images. We aim to use these get a (different) conversation on chronic pain going with/within three stakeholder groups/communities: 1) patients, 2) health professionals, and 3) (students in) (para)medical programmes. I want to actively involve these stakeholders in the development of the dissemination materials, to ensure they effectively empower them.