Francesca Williamson, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Learning Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School, jointly appointed in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Equity at the School of Public Health.
She leads the HEiRS Lab, a multi-disciplinary research group that studies language use and social interaction in real-world health, community, and educational settings. In her substantive research, Williamson primarily uses conversation and discourse-analytic approaches to study the construction and negotiation of particular meanings of race, childhood, and health, including how these ideas become consequential in institutional life.
Across her work, she foregrounds an interactional perspective on racism, ableism, and childism, exploring how these oppressive dynamics are (re)produced and subverted through institutional activities. Her current projects focus on patient-child-provider interaction, food and nutrition communication, and interprofessional health education.
In her methodological research, she publishes about the histories, philosophies, and developments in qualitative inquiry and methodological practice. Williamson is a coauthor of Race Talk in Institutional Settings: A Language and Social Interaction Perspective with Peter Lang and a coeditor of Classical Writings and Contemporary Responses in Qualitative Inquiry with SAGE. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on patient-provider interaction, health equity and justice, and qualitative methodologies and methods.
Select Publications
Williamson, F. A., Lester, J. N., Mattei, J. K., Asghar, M., Ferrell, K., Estrella, G., & Dangle, P. (2025). “Safer than driving”: Risk communication about surgery with racially diverse families in pediatric urology visits. Patient Education and Counseling, 140, 109286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2025.109286
Williamson, F. A., Lester, J. N., Woods, C., & Kaye, E. C. (2024). Questions to promote child-centered care in racially discordant interactions in pediatric oncology. Patient Education and Counseling, 121, 108106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2023.108106
Williamson, F. A. (2024). Black methodologies as ethnomethods: On qualitative methods-making and analyzing the situated work of doing being hybridly human. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 21(4), 426–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2024.2347590
Work for CID:
Francesca Williamson is preparing a publication for the Center.
She is a journalism educator, journalist and international higher education consultant whose career has combined journalism education, international collaboration and media practice. Deborah serves on the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Board of Directors, representing its international membership.
His scholarship examines the relationships among culture, communication, identity, power, sexuality, and globalization, with particular attention to queer African experiences and critical intercultural communication.
She is also the founder and director of the Center for Indigenous Student Media, director of Good Morning Indian Country, an award-winning, student led weekly Indigenous news and information program, as well as creator and director of the Native Storytelling Workshop. She worked as a news anchor and reporter for 20+ years in television markets across the country. Her scholarship focuses on Indigenous representation in media past and present with a focus on improving coverage of Indigenous issues, identity, and communities in non-Indigenous media spaces. Melissa is a board member and education chair for the Indigenous Journalists Association.
She is currently Regional Director of Northeast School Partnerships for the High School Global Navigator Programs at CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange), an international exchange nonprofit, where she builds collaborations with schools, districts, and educators to expand access to academically aligned study abroad programming for high school students. In this role, she works with schools from New Jersey to Maine to share programs for students and professional development opportunities for educators. She oversees more than $9M annually in scholarship funds stewarded by CIEE which make study abroad opportunities accessible to thousands of high school students.
Yizhe’s research interests include bilingual and multilingual language education, varieties of Chinese as heritage languages, translanguaging pedagogies, teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and technology-enhanced language education. More information can be found on her 
Gittins is a practitioner-scholar with over 20 years of leadership, programming, and analysis experience in the areas of peace, education, psychology, youth, and community development. He has lived, worked, and travelled in over 60 countries across 6 continents; taught in schools, colleges, and universities around the world; and trained thousands individuals and organisations on peace and social change-related issues. Other experience includes working in youth offending prisons; developing, launching, and overseeing a wide range of programmes and projects; and consultancy assignments for public, private, and non-profit organizations. He has received multiple awards for his work, including a Rotary Peace Fellowship, KAICIID Fellowship, and Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace. He is also a Positive Peace Activator and Global Peace Index Ambassador for the Institute for Economics and Peace.
She began her career as an English as a second/foreign language teacher. Besides teaching refugees, immigrants, and international students in Minnesota, she also taught conversational English classes in both China and South Korea for seven years. Her experience working with international students prompted her to return to graduate school to study intercultural communication. Research during her PhD program took her back to South Korea to collect narrative data exploring the intercultural relationships between native-English-speaking teachers and Korean students in a classroom setting. This branch of her research explores how the hegemony of English has impacted foreign language classrooms. Ideological beliefs attached to English influence how cross-cultural adaptation occurs in complex and uneven ways. She has also examined perceptions of agency of English speakers within the context of English hegemony. Another branch of Elizabeth’s research is focused on intercultural communication pedagogy. She employs qualitative research to study teacher identity and students’ descriptions of intercultural learning. Deeper intercultural learning occurs through acknowledgement of dialectical tensions as students navigate cultural differences and similarities.
Su-Ann holds a PhD in Intercultural Communication and Cross-cultural Psychology, as well as an Honours degree in Intercultural Communication, and Bachelor’s Degree in Organisational Communication from The University of Queensland, Australia.
