After over two decades spent collaborating in learning about aspects of SWANA cultures Dr Cole was invited to spend six weeks with a Bedouin community in Sinai, learning the local Arabic dialect, and engaging with daily life. The trip resulted in a two-year residency, and she has since been visiting the community for more than 15 years. As a result of this time, and having witnessed first-hand some of the ways in which marginalised groups can be misrepresented, Dr Cole decided to undertake PhD research in order to understand how literary stereotypes can have an impact for indigenous communities far beyond the page, and ways in which these stereotypes can be avoided and challenged.

Dr Cole's research explores the textual application of stereotypes through linguistic manipulation, and the narrative devices used alongside interreferential connections within the travel writing genre. It sits within postcolonial studies, travel writing scholarship, linguistic theory and literary theory.

In 2021, her chapter 'Bedouin is a Place: Freya Stark’s Travel with Nomads' was published in the anthology Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine (2021, Anthem Press). Current research (post-PhD) considers how travel writers engage with social media to develop narratives of otherness (publication pending 2026), the use of ghostwriters in travel writing, and aspects of neocolonialism in travel narratives. Future research will explore narratives of Beduinity by Bedouin writers in the diaspora.