Wendy Pringle

she/her

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Vaccine Evaluation Centre, University of British Columbia

wendy.pringle@bcchr.ubc.ca

Cross-trained in cultural studies, communication, and women’s studies, and with a research agenda that focuses on critically analysing questions raised by the shifting terrain of healthcare in the era of growing social and economic disparity, my research agenda applies an interdisciplinary lens to pressing questions such as how we might better utilize health media (i.e., the ways that health discourse circulates in society), to improve health and social equity. In my current position as a postdoctoral research fellow based at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital Research Institute, I am studying vaccine communication practices among Canadian perinatal healthcare providers. My doctoral research, supported by a Lincoln Fellowship, examined the implications of Canada’s legalization of medical assistance in dying (MAiD). I found that MAiD is constructed as culturally acceptable by folding it in with the ableist concept of health as individual achievement. 

Projects

‘A Better Country to Die In’ Drawing on critical health communication, feminist science and technology studies, and emerging theories in crip/disability studies, I investigated how the recasting of health as an individual right and responsibility has crept into the changing conversation about death and dying. Specifically, this dissertation project focused on how the mediated debates surrounding the legalization process, the cultural history of euthanasia drugs, and the ethical dimensions of disability have shaped assisted dying outcomes in the country. 

Unpacking Vaccine Hesitancy Among Perinatal Healthcare Providers This multi-site CIHR-funded project led by PI Dr. Julie Bettinger and co-PI Dr. Devon Greyson examines how vaccine hesitancy transpires in mediated and clinical discourse. I am conducting an institutional ethnography of care providers to better understand how decision support media might be implemented to better address the concerns of those hesitant to vaccinate.

Publications

Pringle, W. (2019). Problematizations in Assisted Dying Discourse: Testing the “What's the Problem Represented to Be?” (WPR) Method for Critical Health Communication Research, Frontiers in Communication, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00058

Pringle, W.  (2019, November). ‘Hack your cycle’ and other tales of menstruation repair and cure. Paper to be presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA.

Pringle, W.  (2019, May). Self-determination, euthanasia, and the right to die. Paper to be presented at the International Communication Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC.

Pringle, W.  (2018, November). Discourses of autonomy in dying: Canada's medical assistance in dying debates. Paper to be presented at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Activity

Biovalue, reproductive (in)justice, and disability interventions. This panel presented at the 2019 National Women’s Studies Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California scrutinized biomedical discourses and practices that instrumentalize the gendered and disabled body. We engage reproductive biopolitics as a means of exposing and denaturalizing biomedicine’s logics of elimination, debilitation, and de-animation Drawing on feminist science and technology studies’ and disability theory’s shared investment in disputing the valuation of bodies, we intervene in medicine’s claim of authority over the biological body.