A programme, not a pile of papers

How metaphor and positioning organise identity, blame, and agency when the body will not do what it is expected to do — beginning in infertility care, and now extending into human–AI communication during illness and recovery.

Questions

• What metaphors recur when narrators talk about the infertile body, and what identity work do they perform?
• How do figurative choices position tellers, audiences, and institutions across small stories?
• What happens to the need for reassurance when the listener has no body, no faith, no shared history — only language?

Method

Metaphor-Led Positioning Analysis (MLPA): a directed qualitative content analysis identifying metaphor families, read through Level 2 (interactional) and Level 3 (societal) positioning. The newest strand applies analytic autoethnography to a first-person account of patient–AI communication.

Selected publications

• “WTF Uterus?” Metaphors of the body as positioning in infertility blogs by Muslim women. Qualitative Health Research, 2026.
• Reassurance in the loop: An analytic autoethnography of patient–AI communication during illness and recovery. Health Communication (under review).
• Making sense of infertility care: Narrative negotiations of medical authority in Muslim women's online accounts. Communication & Medicine (under review).

Practice implications & future directions

Faith-literate, lineage-sensitive communication training for fertility services; signposting metaphor-aware guidance for clinicians navigating live bioethical debates around ART and emergent technologies.

How infertile Muslim women construct identity and resist stigma across offline and online contexts — and how that identity has to be renegotiated again once the story resolves.

Questions

• How do infertile bloggers position themselves and their readers in the telling of their stories?
• What tensions arise in constructing infertile/fertile subjectivities when addressing a “trying to conceive” community?
• How does identity shift across the full arc of a journey, not just within a single post?

Method

Small-stories and positioning theory (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou), combined with a staged method for tracing identity across time within a single blogger's corpus.

Selected publications

• From offline to online stigma resistance: Identity construction in narratives of infertile Muslim women. Narrative Inquiry, 2025.
• ‘In the same boat’: Affiliation and collective identity in Muslim women's infertility blogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics (under review).
• From diagnosis to departure: A staged small-stories method for tracing identity across the infertility journey in Muslim women's blogs. Qualitative Research (under review).
• Infertility as a heteronormative narrative: Negotiating femininity, wifehood and reproductive womanhood in Muslim women's infertility blogs. Gender and Language (under review).

Impact & future directions

A doctoral thesis (2021) underpins this programme; ongoing work extends the staged method to adjacent chronic-illness narrative contexts.

Translating discourse research into practice — the conviction that attention, identity, meaning, and connection only matter if they leave the page and do something in the world.

Questions

• How can metaphor-aware findings be turned into usable guidance for clinicians and patients?
• What forms of public conversation can carry this research beyond an academic readership?

Projects & outputs

• Led on the original concept, theme, and overall planning for the 2026 Health in Our Hands conference, as part of a four-person organising team; opened the day with the welcome address.
• External consultancy and knowledge exchange work supporting international students and cross-cultural communication.

Future directions

Developing metaphor-aware communication tools for fertility services, including letter-phrasing guidance and consultation checklists.

Where the next research programme is likely to come from — new registers, new communities, and a genuinely new kind of interlocutor.

Current strands

• “What is normal now?” Uncertainty and epistemic positioning in online perimenopause narratives — a small-stories and positioning analysis of Reddit discourse (in preparation).
• Family digital intimacy: how a group chat becomes a design studio, conflict court, and repair tool — a chapter for Digital Intimacies (Bloomsbury, provisionally accepted).
• Patient–AI communication as a new register for an old human need: recognition, translated into language with no body, faith, or shared history behind it.

Metaphor-Led Positioning Analysis (MLPA) — a five-step protocol combining directed qualitative content analysis with small-stories positioning theory: (1) unitising small stories, (2) metaphor spotting, (3) conceptual mapping into metaphor families, (4) positioning read-through at interactional and societal levels, (5) trajectory tracing across time. Developed for infertility blogs; portable to adjacent health contexts where bodies are problematised, including endometriosis, menopause, and recurrent pregnancy loss.

Staged small-stories method — a way of tracing identity shifts across a single blogger's full corpus over time, rather than within a single post. Full detail in “From diagnosis to departure” (Qualitative Research, under review).