Research Overview

Most of my research focuses on questions concerning medicine, technology, and mind. Some specific projects include: 

Cosmetic Gynecology and Non-Ideal Subjectivity 

Cosmetic gynecological procedures are on the rise across the world, including among minors. In many Western countries, labiaplasty has become one of the fastest-growing cosmetic procedures, while hymenoplasty has also become increasingly common across the SWANA region and its diasporic communities. Existing discussions focus largely on whether patients have given voluntary informed consent and whether their preferences have been shaped by oppressive social conditions. My work takes a step back and asks how we should understand preferences that emerge from non-ideal forms of subject formation and embodied experience. I argue that this question has no one-size-fits-all answer and requires a cross-cultural account of how subjects are formed within different social, material, and affective worlds. This shift has consequences for how such preferences are evaluated, how clinical deliberation should proceed, and what forms of care may be required beyond either accepting the preference at face value or overriding it. 

Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Transnational Determinants of Health 

Assisted reproductive technologies have expanded across the world, including through legal reforms that extend access to previously excluded groups and permit practices such as non-medical egg freezing. Yet expanding formal access does not necessarily transform who can meaningfully use these technologies or the conditions under which they do so. Existing discussions tend to explain these disparities through social determinants of health, barriers to access, or the policies of individual countries. My work takes a step back and asks how reproductive possibilities are shaped by interconnected social, political, economic, and technological forces whose effects unfold across different places and contexts. One example is technological optimism, which can encourage people and institutions to outsource present reproductive decision-making to the anticipated capacities of future technologies.

Unity and the Structure of Conscious Experience 

Traumatic experiences, including sexual violence, can profoundly alter how a person experiences her body, memory, agency, and sense of self. Existing discussions tend to focus on the psychological, cognitive, and clinical effects of trauma, while consciousness itself is rarely made central. My developing work takes a step back and asks what these experiences might reveal about the structure of conscious experience itself. In particular, I am interested in whether we have good reasons to preserve the different senses of unity commonly attributed to conscious experience, including phenomenal unity, and whether traumatic experience complicates the assumption that these forms of unity necessarily coincide. This question has consequences for how we understand the organization of conscious experience and what becomes visible when its unity is treated as something to be explained rather than assumed.