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.
