My Fulbright Journey in Taiwan: Language-Discordance as a Social Phenomenon
Social worlds and social relationships are created, maintained, and resisted through human communication. The best of communication scholarship emerges through researchers’ willingness and ability to listen, by recognizing the perspectives of others, and learning through the nuances and complexities of communication practices. This is particularly important when working with marginalized and underserved populations, whose voices are often deprived and silenced, resulting in disparities in their everyday life. These are the values that have driven my research program for nearly two decades. Interests in and empathy for humans and the human phenomenon is fundamental to the scholarship of any social scientist. I have dedicated my research to understanding how linguistic and cultural differences can create barriers to patients’ health experiences, including their access to and process of care. In particular, I am interested in how language-discordant patients, such as patients with English-limited proficiency (LEP), coordinate and negotiate healthcare services with their healthcare providers. As I presented my model of Bilingual Health Communication (Hsieh, 2016), a communicative model that aims to provide guidance for interpreter-mediated provider-patient interactions, to various groups in the United States, interpreters of American Sign Language often told me that their deaf patients are
