Articles / Essays
Wildfire Mental Health Support Programs
published in Journal of Public Health Policy (2025) can be read here
Abstract:
Global climate change has increased the risk of wildfires, which pose serious short and long-term mental health problems. Emotional well-being and access to specialized health services are among the most challenging health concerns of those affected by wildfires. In this overview, I discuss the mental health burdens of wild-fires and the need for programmatic solutions and resources for developing mental health support infrastructure, including access to care, Skills for Psychological Recovery training programs, and digital health tools. These specialized programs and tools have the potential to improve community resilience and reduce the negative impacts of wildfires on mental health.
Critical Pedagogical Approaches to Structural Drivers of Health
published in Journal of Ethics (2025) can be read here
Abstract:
Social accountability in health professions education prominently has to do with preparing students and trainees in pediatrics to do 3 key things: prioritize social and structural drivers as preconditions of children’s health, work to mitigate health inequity among children by partnering with community members and families, and integrate advocacy for health system improvement for children into practice. This article suggests strategies for health justice advocacy and for strengthening cross-disciplinary teaching about how to screen children for structural drivers of health.
How Private Equity Undermines Rural Health Equity
published in Journal of Ethics (2025) can be read here
Abstract:
Capital and staff shortages have forced many rural hospitals to close. Private equity investment in rural hospitals has been one solution to these problems. This article argues, however, that private equity firms’ business practices, especially shortening acquisition-to-sale time and maximizing profit margin, generate overall health care market instability. This consequence can be particularly devastating for people living in rural areas of the United States, who report worse health outcomes, more chronic disease, and more restricted access to health services than people in urban or suburban regions.
Physician Engagement With Private Equity Firms
by Amber Comer & Jake Young, published in Journal of Ethics (2025) can be read here
Abstract:
Private equity investments in health care raise several clinical and ethical questions about private equity’s influence on clinicians’ practices. This article canvasses how these questions are navigated in AMA Code of Ethics opinions.
A Genealogy of Poetry
published in Semiotica (2024) can be read here
Abstract:
Poetry does not have a history; it has many histories. By tracing the history of poetry in the West, in conjunction with genre studies and research on concept formation, it is evident that the genre “poetry” is contingent on the various rhetorical situations of its production. Such an approach reveals that the concept “poetry,” like all concepts, is always in flux. Yet, despite the fact that “poetry” means different things to different people in different times and places, studies of oral poetry have yielded insights into traits that might be considered universal to poetry, such as its performativity and categorization as ritual language. Other common aspects include the use of parallelism, analogy and metaphor, musicality, and how poems function as metapragmatic symbols that reflect the values of their cultural production. This functionalist approach to poetry reveals that the evolution of poetry is at once historically contingent and culturally universal, and recognizes that poetry’s multiplicity and continual becoming operate with the primary goals of generating and sharing culturally relative meaning.
Taking Time to Heal: Poetry Writing and Healthcare Provider Burnout
published in Journal of Poetry Therapy (2024) can be read here
Abstract:
Healthcare professionals are increasingly suffering from burnout. Poetry writing should be considered as a resource to reduce symptoms of burnout. The effects of poetry writing have been studied in clinical settings for both health professionals and for patients, and benefits have been found for both groups. Healthcare workers suffering from burnout occupy a unique position as both patient and provider, and so may “double-dip” into the benefits that poetry writing provides both patients and practitioners.
How Should Wet Market Practices Be Regulated to Curb Zoonotic Disease Transmission?
published in Journal of Ethics (2024) can be read here
Abstract:
Consumption and trade of wild animals presents major zoonotic disease transmission risks. Policies that aim to limit these practices must balance environmental health against the fact that trade and consumption of wild animals are important sources of livelihood and food security for many people. This commentary on a case suggests how public health threats posed by the wild animal trade, wet markets, and bushmeat practices might guide policies and actions of relevant stakeholders. A One Health approach is offered to navigate competing interests and balance ethical concerns.
Becoming Other: Cannibalistic Translation as Liminal Transformation
published in Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction (2023) can be read here
Abstract:
Combining the translation theory of Haroldo de Campos and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s analysis of Indigenous metaphysics, this essay argues that the metaphorical consumption or cannibalization of texts through translation highlights the role literary influences play in expanding and transforming global literary networks. An understanding of how translated texts consume the source text in the process of their transcreation reveals a rhizomatic exchange and circulation of literature that destabilize at once traditional power structures and conventional translation binaries that give precedence to questions of originality and fidelity. Specifically, attention to rhizomatic literary influences acknowledges the inherent power dynamics and inequalities within postcolonial literature. A cannibalistic view of translation brings into focus these implicit power imbalances while also offering translation as a means to subvert and transform language and cultural hierarchies. Cannibalistic translation recognizes translation as a liminal process of becoming other that transforms not only the source and target texts but also the translator, readers, and literary networks, a process that reverberates through the dialogical relations connecting them all. By drawing on Viveiros de Castro’s works on Indigenous Amazonian ontologies, this article demonstrates ways in which the cannibalistic translation theory of the de Campos brothers can continue to be refined.
What Should Health Professions Students Know About Industrial Agriculture and Disease?
published in Journal of Ethics (2023) can be read here
Abstract:
Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) perpetuate deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate change; increase risk of zoonotic disease transmission and antimicrobial resistance; and exacerbate environmental and health injustice. Risks CAFOs pose to human health demand the attention of clinicians and those who teach them, since they have duties to respond with care to patients and communities where health is undermined by CAFOs’ presence.
AMA Code of Medical Ethics’ Opinions Related to Robotic Surgery
published in Journal of Ethics (2023) can be read here
Abstract:
More frequent use of robotic-assisted surgeries raises several ethical questions about care quality and justice, informed decision making and consent, conflicts of interest, innovation in health care practice, and continuing education. The AMA Code of Medical Ethics does not directly address use of robotic-assisted surgery but offers several relevant opinions.
AMA Code of Medical Ethics’ Opinions Related to Interprofessional Collaboration
published in Journal of Ethics (2023) can be read here
Abstract:
Changes in the structure and practice of health care have led to a clinical environment heavily reliant on interprofessional collaboration. The AMA Code of Medical Ethics offers several opinions on the importance of the interprofessional movement in health professions education and practice.
AMA Code of Medical Ethics’ Opinions Related to Clinical Use of BMI
published in Journal of Ethics (2023) can be read here
Abstract:
Although body-mass index (BMI) is regularly used, it has come under clinical and ethical scrutiny. The AMA Code of Medical Ethics offers guidance on the use of diagnostic tools that could be sources of harm to patients.
Why Poetry?: Semiotic Scaffolding & the Poetic Architecture of Cognition
published in Metaphor and Symbol (2023) can be read here
Abstract:
Poetry is a process. While people typically refer to poems as textual objects, our experience of poetry is inherently embodied and enacted, meaning that we experience poems as events that we contextualize as gestalt representations. We experience metaphors, too, as processes, which arise from experiential gestalts, that extend gestalt structures and lay the conceptual foundation for our experience of the world. This article argues that, like metaphors, poetic gestalts can be mapped onto other experiences to help people navigate their worlds. While this kind of poetic thought has largely been considered by scholars to have existed only since the emergence of the modern human mind sometime in the last 60,000 years, the author suggests that poetic thought likely arose prior to modern cognition, and may have in fact given rise to it. A crucial aspect of the embodied and enactive approach to poetry outlined in the article is that people’s experience of poetry is fundamentally contextual and emotional. Furthermore, because emotions are a primary source of meaning, our emotional responses to poetry makes it a useful tool for extending our own conceptual apparatuses, enhancing emotional intelligence, and for generating shared values.
How food fueled language, Part I: human creativity and the coevolution of cooking and language
published in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture (2022) can be read here
Abstract:
Humans are unique in their creative abilities and this creativity likely arose as a result of self-domestication. Language use would have been a driver of early human self-domestication, and this paper examines how the controlled use of fire for cooking was an early driver in the development of language. Cooking allowed for greater caloric intake and a greater diversity of diet, contributing to larger hominin brain sizes and group sizes. These developments created new social constraints that were met by the emergence of language. Diets can impact neuroplasticity, enhancing divergent thinking and creativity. One potential source of such transformative foodstuffs were intoxicants, the use of which could have easily become ritualized and used as social and cognitive tools. Cooking and ritualization, as fundamentally hierarchically and temporally structured actions, are grounded in recursion, which is also a key aspect of language. Cooking, recursive, and symbolic thought coevolved, driving the development of language. This paper is part one of a two-part article.
How Food Fueled Language, Part II: Language Genres, Songs in the Head, and the Coevolution of Cooking and Language
published in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture (2022) can be read here
Abstract:
This paper examines how cooking and language emerged and coevolved as drivers of human creativity. Through this dynamic coevolutionary process, shifts in diet affected demographics, which increased social and cognitive complexity, leading to new technological and social innovations, and eventually genetic changes. A work of interdisciplinary synthesis, this paper combines work from diverse fields including anthropology, cognitive archaeology, evolutionary syntax, genre studies, neuroscience, and paleoethnobotany. A key contribution from genres studies is that the emergence of language allowed for a proliferation of linguistic genres (referred to collectively as proto-poetry), and that earworms, or songs stuck in the head, are likely cognitive fossils of these first proto-poems that evolved to enhance working memory and recursive thought. The argument proposed here hinges on the beliefs that in order to better understand how language first arose, we need to ask what the first words were about, and that food was likely the subject around which language first gravitated. Language is a cultural tool that emerged from our interactions with our environment, and food is a very important aspect of that environment. This paper is part two of a two-part article.
Poetic Origins: Revisiting William Carlos Williams’s “The Poem as a Field of Action” and Mapping the Building Blocks of Poetry
published in Cosmos and History (2021) can be read here
Abstract:
This article begins with a reflection on William Carlos Williams’s lecture “The Poem as a Field of Action” in light of recent developments in theoretical physics as a means to uncover fundamental aspects of poetry. Discussing where and how meaning originates, the paper explores quantum mechanics, speculative realism, panpsychism, endosymbiosis, Gia theory, and biosemiotics. Biosemiotics interprets life as a semiotic process and proposes that biological life at all levels is concerned with meaning-making. The essay concludes by arguing that the basic elements of poetry”such as semiosis, metaphor, and interpretation”are basic aspects of all living, autopoietic beings.
Dissolving Metaphors in Emily Dickinson’s Poems About Drink
published in The Emily Dickinson Journal (2019) can be read here
Abstract:
Emily Dickinson grew up amid the rise of the Massachusetts temperance movement. Of her nearly 1800 poems, over twenty poems deal with “drink” and involve drinking or drunkenness, an understudied theme in her work considering such poems account for approximately one out of every seventy-eight poems in her oeuvre. Given her exposure to temperance effort and temperance literature, and given her critical preoccupation with dualities (life / death, nature / God, mind / body, possibility / impossibility), it is not surprising that Dickinson would turn to this complex topic. This paper will explore why Dickinson repeatedly returns to this theme and will attempt to answer questions such as: what does Dickinson get out of returning again and again to write about alcohol? How might these poems be understood within the context of the temperance movement at the time? What kind of work do images of drinking achieve in such poems? And are there multiple angles she brings to this theme?
The Offal Truth
published in Gastronomica (2018) can be read here
Abstract:
While it is true that offal is not widely consumed in the United States today, this has not always been the case, and organ meat has made a resurgence in haute cuisine. In international cuisine, certain foods that utilize offal, including foie gras, pâté, and sweetbread, have long been considered gourmet. International demand has created a thriving export market for beef by-products, which otherwise would end up as trimmings in processed food or pet food, or rendered into lard or tallow. As global food markets make ever more inroads into once isolated areas, what is eaten out of necessity and what is eaten out of pleasure each takes on an increasingly economic character. The etymology of “offal” itself reveals the dual nature of organ meat as both a food of necessity (a source of inexpensive protein) and a food of luxury (enjoyed as a delicacy). We are used to buying meat from the market in neat little packages that in no way resemble the animals they came from or the bloody process that it took to go from living being to inanimate slab of meat. Offal does not offer this distraction. I recently purchased a beef tongue from the Mizzou Meat Market for a dinner party, and there was no way to ignore that the tongue came from a cow, and the visceral nature of offal reminds us that we, too, are animals.