I am an Assistant Professor of English and core faculty member in the Texts and Technology Ph.D. program at the University of Central Florida. My research uses rhetoric as an analytical tool for examining scientific, technological, and medical discourses.
My book project, The Patient Empowerment Paradox, investigates how widely accepted rhetorical moves often considered empowering become gridlocked and
competing channels of information that can be disempowering and harmful to patients seeking medical relief. This project uses Lyme disease as a case study for understanding the patient empowerment model of chronic illness.
I am currently recruiting participants for my UCF SEED grant-funded project, “Making Sense of Long Covid: Illness Narratives Within and Beyond the Doctor’s Office.” This research study aims to learn about how people with pre-existing chronic illnesses are diagnosed with and treated for long covid. The study consists of uploading an illness story to a secure online portal.
You can submit:
- A written narrative
- An audio recording
- Screenshots of social media posts that tell your story
To qualify, you must:
- Have a pre-existing chronic illness such as diabetes or fibromyalgia
- Have long covid
- Have experienced long covid for at least 12 weeks
- Be comfortable speaking in English
- Be age 18+
Please check this site for updates on the project (as well as presentations and publications about it). I would be glad to provide you with copies of any publications that interest you.
You can reach me at sarah.singer@ucf.edu and @__sarahsinger.
Note: I aim to make this site as accessible as possible. Please let me know if you’d like me to share the text and images in an alternative format.
