Heather Snay

I am a scholar whose work is motivated by my own lived experiences and, as such, seeks to make change for a more empathetic world. I am interested in how we can foster more open-mindedness and cognitive flexibility through empathy-based pedagogies to ultimately create better ways of doing be that in biomedicine or in higher education.



My approach to achieving these goals manifests in two key branches of my career. The first is my research, which combines a health geographer’s perspective with the methods and mediums of the humanities. The second is mentoring and helping to establish supportive programming for graduate students, through fostering learning spaces of wonder in academic support spaces like the learning and writing center.



As a health geographer I study the geographic self, exploring ways that the body is conceptualized as a space and how, through this framing, the inner experiences of illness become something to translate to share them with the external world, or a practitioner. For example, I investigate the experience of female chronic pain through this geographic lens, to render this embodied experience visible with the hope that this scholarship will improve understandings of the complexity and diversity that is the embodied pain experience. Additionally, my scholarship considers the role that gender, and culture contribute to the biomedical experience. As such, I contribute to the geographic conversations around the ways that the fleshiness of the body and our lived experiences within our bodies, as embodied beings, influence our external experiences as we move through and engage with the world.



In general, I am interested in exploring how the humanities can render visible the patient experience in a way that facilitates more empathetic approaches to biomedical care. Another component of this research focuses on how the visual world of art can be embraced by biomedicine to teach empathy as a physician skillset to improve patient-practitioner communication and the efficacy of biomedicine as it relates to chronic pain in women.