My research spans several disciplines, including cultural studies, literary studies, creative practice research, philosophies of science and ethics, and critical communications studies. All of my work, however, involves trying to better understand how the pictures and stories we make and tell, and the way we make and tell them, change how we treat each other and ourselves.
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My research has always been grounded in feminist and critical gender studies, critical race and postcolonial studies. Experience caring for loved ones with mental illness and dementia, and having an autoimmune illness that requires me to do things differently, has given me a profound interest in critical studies of disability and care.
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CURRENT RESEARCH
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The aesthetics of child removal and graphic narrative
An analysis of visual and verbal/written communication in campaigns by child placement provider Barnardos Australia across 2020 and 2021, using political aesthetics derived from Ranciere, and a response in the form of five original short graphic narratives. (Australian National University, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics)
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Writing pedagogy; online delivery and Writing about Writing pedagogy
An analysis of the processes of writing instruction undergraduate and masters level research in writing studies, set in the context of a discussion of emerging trends and practices in university writing program delivery (with research leader Dr Beck Wise, University of Queensland, and Dr Simone Lyons).
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Improving medical communication
An applied communications research project using narrative medicine and critical communication theories to investigate barriers to effective communication in clinical settings, with a focus on developing creative tools for improved health care delivery (with Dr Erich Schulz and Dr Frank Phillips, Mater Hospitals, Brisbane).
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PAST RESEARCH
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Transhuman Change: Towards an Ethic of Writing
A literary and cultural studies analysis of representations of radical physical change in literature, visual art, film, television and medical discourse, examining the ways images of bodily transformation use voicelessness to express anxieties and fantasies associated with mortality, sex, and unrequited love and arriving at an ethic of valorising life over prosopopoeia, writing gender and ability as irony, and representing others to themselves as they are loved.
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The Fountain: martyrdom and women's domestic lives
This research examined martyrdom as an alternative to masochism as a means of decoding women-authored representations of women's sexuality and domestic relationships, using the work of Elaine Scarry and James Elkins to examine how both violence and creativity arise out of the urge to counteract the doubt provoked by reported experiences of bodily pleasure and pain.
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Representation and Rape
This research, conducted when marital rape and rape of people in sex work were not recognised as crimes, used an examination of representations of sexual violence in western art, literature, law and news media to arrive at an understanding of how narratives of rape as theft persisted in contemporary legal responses to sexual violence, and how creative works might express the subjective experience of sexual assault in order to challenge the perception of rape as a crime of property.
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RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS
2022 '"I wrote to become part of that discourse community":
Developing writerly identity and agency in an online writing course’
Wise, Beck, Simone Lyons and Siall Waterbright
TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses
Digital Realism Special Issue 69: December 22
[refereed publication]
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2020 'Case-mix adjusted postanaesthesia care unit length of stay
and business intelligence dashboards
for feedback to anaesthetists'
Erich Schulz, Frank Phillips and Siall Waterbright
British Journal of Anaesthesia 125.6: 1079-1087
[refereed publication]
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CONFERENCES
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2020 CLOSURE Graphic Narrative International Summer School
Kiel University (online: funded participant)​
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2019 Panel presentation: Writing Culture and Comics
Australian Anthropology Society Conference
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2019 Panel presentation: Developing Academic Writing Self-efficacy
through Writing About Writing
with Dr Beck Wise and Dr Simone Lyons
Australasian Association of Writing Programs​
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2012 Presentation: Writing student expectations and experiences research
Teaching & Learning Conference, QUT
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2008 Performance: “Things that don’t exist for my mother”
Living Memory: Postgraduate Writing Conference, University of Sydney
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2007 Presentation (funded participant):
Making Something of Yourself (Metaphor and Metamorphosis)
Sylvia Plath Seventy-fifth Birthday Symposium, Oxford University
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2007 Presentation (funded participant)
“The F Word: Where does feminism belong in the curriculum?'
Teaching Contemporary Women’s Writing Conference
Brighton University
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