Bio

Daena J. Goldsmith is Professor of Health Studies at Lewis & Clark College and Director of the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative. Her scholarship, teaching, and community service focus on how our patterns of communication create identities, relationships, and communities. Her award-winning book, Communicating Social Support, examined how we communicate support to one another through everyday stresses and life crises and her research on how couples and families communicate about illness has appeared in Journal of Communication, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Social Science & Medicine, Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, and Journal of Applied Communication. Her scholarship has been recognized with the National Communication Association’s Gerald R. Miller Book Award , Bill Eadie Distinguished Scholarly Article Award, and Franklin H. Knower Article Award.

Her latest work, Polyphonic Resistance: Blogging Motherhood and Autism (forthcoming in 2027) chronicles how a loosely linked network of mom bloggers made sense of mothering and autism acceptance in the early 2000s.  Their stories and ways of interacting offer powerful alternatives to the stigmatizing and polarizing conversations that too often dominate public discussions of motherhood and autism today.

Professor Goldsmith’s teaching helps undergraduates develop an interdisciplinary knowledge base and communication competencies for careers and community service in health-related fields. Her courses cover interpersonal communication, provider-patient interaction, communication in health care teams and organizations, healthcare interactions across cultures, narrative medicine, and narratives of illness and disability.  In 2017, she was awarded Lewis & Clark’s Lorry Lokey Faculty Excellence Award.  She also facilitates community-based narrative medicine workshops and trainings.