Beginning her child life career at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, she was struck by the pervasive and persistent omission of children’s voices in their healthcare experiences, particularly in those nearest to the possibility of loss or death. While concurrently working as a child life specialist and completing her doctoral degree, Dr. Boles began to assemble a research agenda grounded in subjectivist, post-structural understandings of knowledge that situates learning in socio-cultural contexts such as the hospital, outpatient clinic, community, and family. Blending traditional and innovative qualitative methods with established developmental theories, her research uses a Certified-Child-Life-Specialist-informed clinical perspective to deconstruct the ways in which children learn about and enact dominant social binaries such as health/illness, life/death, and childhood/adulthood. To address the problematic theory-to-practice pipeline that dominates most healthcare fields, Dr. Boles’ priority as a researcher is to produce work that challenges paternalist medical narratives by disrupting power hierarchies between patient/provider and researcher/researched, and dismantling social beliefs that challenge children’s abilities to access information about their diagnosis, treatment, and life experiences. As a result, her studies rely upon developmentally appropriate, child-centered, and trauma-informed methods (such as narrative or semi-structured interviews, arts-based activities, and group play interventions) to elicit the pediatric voices typically marginalized by medical research models.