I am currently working on four projects

In the OnePulse project, I analyze objects that were left behind at the Pulse Memorial to commemorate the victims of the Pulse shooting. I use a symbolic interactionist approach to infer the meaning of the objects and propose that this commemorative place creates collective meaning and collective emotions that have social meaning to the Orlando community and more broadly to LGBTQI+ peoples and allies. The goal of this project is to commemorate the lives of all those who were affected by the Pulse tragedy. I have worked very slowly on this project, because I have had to manage a lot of my emotions along the way.

The second project is called Hetero-cisgender rituals: The ritualized treatment of bodies in medicine. This project is my working dissertation. I combine two types of data- narrative essays and narrative interviews of medical trainees about their experiences with sexual and gender minority patients, within the institution of medicine. I call these experiences hetero-cisgender rituals or the institutionalized practice of doing medicine strictly from and for binary, heterosexual and cisgender bodies. I use conflict theory to explore forms of oppression in medicine across three settings (i.e., medical school, clinical setting, and within the profession). The goal of this project is to inform the next generation of doctors to create a more equitable and inclusive institution of medicine and more broadly society. This project recently received the Amplify Knight Voices grant supported by CitizenScienceGIS.

The third project uses a national dataset called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). From these data, I draw on several health outcomes and have developed several smaller projects that center on the health of trans*peoples. These projects use an intersectional framework to assess the role that income, education, race, and ethnicity have on patterns of health and health utilization of trans* peoples, including reproductive health, preventative care, substance use, diet and exercise, health access, and mental health. The goal of these projects is to decenter heterosexual-cisgender identities and speak to and about erasure and invisibility of the "other" by using data to tell a sociological story. Through these projects I also describe the formulation of statistical violence or what I define as institutionalized statistical practices that erase peoples from datasets.

The four project seeks to understand the causes of substance use among pregnant women and the role of patient's trust in their physicians and health seeking behaviors. This is a funded project by the Peter F. McManus Charitable Trust and developed in collaboration with Dr. Schellhammer, an obstetrician and gynecologist physician at Orlando Health Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women and Babies. This is a mixed-method project that uses both electronic medical records and narrative interviews to further understand the clinical experiences of pregnant women that are substance users, the causes of substance use and maternal and neonatal outcomes.