Research agenda
My research lies at the intersection of Technical and Professional Communication (TPC), AI ethics, and healthcare communication. Specifically, I investigate how digital technologies and technical texts shape knowledge production and routine practice in professional and clinical contexts. Alongside this work, I engage in writing program administration through research on inclusive pedagogy and curriculum design.
Exploring AI Literacy & Inclusion in Writing Program Administration (WPA)
As a teacher-researcher of TPC, I am committed to elevating social justice pedagogies and critical AI use. One of my recent publications,“Rhetorics of Authenticity: Ethics, Ethos, and Artificial Intelligence” (Deptula et al., 2024) in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication examines authenticity when using language models (LLMs) to compose professional texts. By using an Aristotelian understanding of ethos, we argue that LLMs offer three affordances for students and TPC instructors: developing outlines for commonplace genres, transforming line-level prose into clear writing according to readability standards, and ensuring grammatical and mechanical correctness. However, the formulaic use of genre by LLMs to outline texts lacks phronesis (practical wisdom), surface-level stylistic markers undermine the arete (excellence or virtuousness) of writers and their texts, and mechanical and grammatical correctness diminishes social and cultural eunoia (goodwill) in favor of conformity. I specifically advanced the article’s sections on genre and plain language, particularly the claim that generative AI tools will likely tend toward the erasure of linguistic diversity.
Building on my broader inquiry into rhetorical authenticity, I am currently involved in a multi-phase cross-institutional research project on AI authenticity and assessment. Recently, alongside my co-collaborators, Drs. Mason Pellegrini and Paul Hunter, I received an ACM SIGDOC Career Advancement Research Grant for Phase 1 of this project. Funding was used to examine expert audiences’ perceptions of GenAI produced STEM reports via 400 “trials” in which participants attempted to differentiate between student-written and AI-generated text excerpts. Student-written excerpts were drawn from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) and paired with parallel AI-generated excerpts generated by DeepSeek-R1. For each trial, participants labeled the excerpt (student-written or AI-generated), reported their confidence on a Likert scale, and provided an open-ended rationale for their decision. We found that TPC instructors can consistently differentiate between AI-generated and student-written text at a statistically significant level. Yet, participants misclassified authentic student writing as AI-generated 34% of the time, highlighting the importance of AI literacy–focused pedagogies and policy over punitive or surveillance-oriented approaches. These initial quantitative findings are currently under review at Communication Design Quarterly, and our qualitative analysis is underway. Future research will examine the rhetorical strategies these expert audiences used and the implications of rhetorical authenticity for TPC pedagogy, WPA assessment, and curriculum development.
In addition to my research in AI ethics, my Master’s thesis in liberatory pedagogy has deepened my commitment to inclusive pedagogy and writing program administration. My work with Purdue’s Professional Writing Pedagogy Group contributed to a forthcoming collaborative publication in Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. This piece explores forming and maintaining writing program working groups that develop inclusive and accessible curriculum. In my contribution, I emphasize how a distributed leadership model and attention to instructional emotional labor can strengthen sustainable teaching communities within writing programs.
Investigating Notions of Chronicity via Patient Advocacy & Patient Experience Design (PXD)
My completed dissertation, “Charting Chronicity: A Thematic Analysis of Clinical Pain Assessment Tools and Patient Documentation Design,” is the first stage of a longer research agenda examining how clinical scribing technologies shape chronic pain treatment and perceptions of disability. Pain is the primary cause of disability and the main reason people seek care. This study asks: How does routine assessment documentation—across U.S pain and spine clinics—frame chronic pain and chronicity, and how might these technical artifacts contribute to assessment disparities?
I analyzed how chronic pain and the body in pain are rhetorically constructed in two common clinical genres: pain assessment scales and patient intake forms. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory, genre ecology, and Patient Experience Design (PXD), I conducted a thematic analysis of over 200 documents collected from outpatient pain and spine clinics across 32 states, using the rhetorical lenses of kairos (timeliness), chronos (quantitative time), and hexis (one’s bodily state). I argue that these genres frame pain as acute, linear, and predictable—flattening the lived realities of chronic illness and reinforcing ableist norms. Accordingly, I propose a feminist application of PXD (Melonçon, 2017) to better account for patient experiences of chronic pain.
This dissertation has already paved a platform for future work on chronicity and electronic scribing practices. One chapter, “One Size Does Not Fit All: How Clinical Pain Assessment Scales and Tools Mask Crip Narratives of Chronicity,” was published in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication. This spring, I will submit my second results chapter, “Mapping the Body in Pain: Accounting for hexis and Western Conceptions of Wellness in Patient Intake Documentation,” to Technical Communication Quarterly. Building upon my dissertation, my upcoming book will:
Investigate how the design and usability of electronic health records (EHRs) influence pain recording practices and perceptions of chronicity.
Develop actionable recommendations to improve clinical scribing practices through feminist PXD and critical disability studies approaches.
Enhancing Rural Healthcare Communication Networks & Clinical Technologies via Narrative Medicine
For the past 15 months, I have been involved in a multidisciplinary, grant-funded project, “Enhancing Rural Healthcare by Incorporating Generative AI and Machine Learning: Building Stronger Communication Networks.” Phase 1 identified communication challenges faced by rural clinics in the North-Central United States, particularly in Indiana, where geographic isolation, financial constraints, and limited resources contribute to practitioner burnout and rural health disparities. Through surveys and interviews, my team and I documented provider-to-provider and provider-to-patient challenges. Overall, practitioners face inefficient communication networks and generic patient education materials that do not align with the needs of rural clinics and patient populations. Our first publication—“Navigating methodological mutability: Researching rural healthcare written communication in the age of generative artificial intelligence”—is under its second revision at the Journal of Written Communication.
Phase 1 received $90,900 from regional and university-affiliated grants and initiated an NEH proposal (083024b) on algorithmic harm and the need for narrative medicine alongside clinical AI. My co-collaborators and I, including undergraduate researchers, will submit our current results to IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication this fall. In Phase 2, we will develop a locally hosted AI prototype that tailors patient education materials to better fit the contextual needs of rural patients. More broadly, we will explore integrating medical narrative techniques into pre-existing AI healthcare tools to foster a more empathic and eudaimonic approach to patient care, particularly in active listening, enhancing provider–patient empathy, and identifying risks of AI-assisted diagnoses. Through this work, I aim to advance patient-centered and context-aware AI applications in rural healthcare settings that improve provider communication and patient outcomes.
Ultimately, my scholarship in AI literacy, pain assessment, and rural healthcare communication sheds light on how technologies can be critically leveraged for ethical engagement and structural change. My work on rhetorical authenticity and the critical use of LLMs in professional writing informs current best practices in TPC pedagogy and assessment. Exploring how to build and sustain infrastructure for inclusive pedagogical practices in WPA empowers diverse voices and fosters institutional community. Finally, my research on clinical documentation and rural healthcare communication aims to support patients, providers, and land-grant institutions in advancing health equity and access.
