Research
The Centre for Culture and Health is the site of many ambitious and groundbreaking inter- and multidisciplinary research projects that bring together wellbeing, health and illness with perspectives and practices from culture, language, history and society.
Research Projects
This interdisciplinary project studies the representation, meaning and value of recovery from illness in culture, medicine and society. It explores the relationship between recovery and narrative from a critical perspective that interrogates narrative’s claim to cure. It argues that recovery functions as an organisational tool of medical and social management that has the power to grant or restrict access to biomedical and economic resources and services, and to systems of care, relationships and freedoms. The data includes fiction and non-fiction literature, film, mass media and social media written in English, French and Finnish languages.
Project funder and duration: Research Council of Finland, 2023-2027 (decision no. 356103)
Entanglements of Illness and Recovery and Rethinking Recovery and the End of Covid-19.
Contact person: Avril Tynan
Words for Care: Literature, Healthcare and Democracy investigates the meanings of literature and shared reading in the context of multilingual healthcare. The project brings together narrative medicine and cultural language learning for the first time. We are developing multilingual narrative medicine practices and studying the potential of reading groups to enhance narrative, cultural and linguistic competence, as well as the social inclusion of social and healthcare professionals who speak Finnish as a first or as a foreign language.
Project funder and duration: Kone Foundation, 2024-2026
Contact person: Viola Čapková
Read more on the project webpages.
The #ENDOs project is a European initiative that educates and supports adults dealing with chronic diseases, with a specific focus on endometriosis. With a potential reach of 14 million women across Europe – who often refer to themselves as “ENDOs,” this project aspires to empower these individuals to take a more active role in their healthcare journey. The project’s innovative approach incorporates the world of art and culture as skill developers, creating user-centric learning tools that aim to build an engaged community of ENDOs and their caregivers. Through performing and visual arts, storytelling, narrative medicine, and digital tools, healthcare experts and ENDOs will facilitate their understanding and communication with each other.
Project funder and duration: Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Education and Training Programme 2023-2026.
Read more about the project and participate in research here.
Contact person: Avril Tynan
Completed Projects
Broken Minds examined mental illness and disability through four stories, four individuals and a family. Using the concept of mental care, it explored the experiences of families, relatives and friends in private and public spaces, and between the home and the hospital. The temporal range, from the 1860s to the 1950s, extended from the birth and development of the psychiatric care system in Finland up to the threshold of dismantling institutional care. The project explored these changes from the novel perspectives of private individuals and families. Outcomes of the project include presentations, articles and a book.
Project funder and duration: Kone Foundation, 2020-2022
Contact person: Kirsi Tuohela
Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory develops ideas and analytical instruments that will equip researchers, professional groups and non-academic audiences to navigate today’s social and textual environments that are dominated by storytelling. We put contemporary literary fiction in dialogue with the manipulative stories that spread around the internet, in order to reveal the dubious relationship that some narratives have with identity, truth, politics, and complex systems such as climate change. In order to confront these issues, we reveal the sophisticated story-critical ideas and techniques offered by works of contemporary fiction.
Project funder and duration: Research Council of Finland, 2018-2022 (Tampere University)
Contact person: Hanna Meretoja
Read more on the project website.
ArtsEqual examined the implementation of equity in the Finnish arts and arts education service system with multi-artistic, -scientific and -methodological approaches. Field studies, interventions and surveys (e.g. in primary school, Basic Arts Education, arts organizations, care and nursing homes, and prisons) showed that the services do not reach everyone equally but mainly benefit those already well-off in society. The research identified a number of historically ingrained patterns of unequal, discriminatory mechanisms (e.g. distanciation, exclusion, hierarchy, utilitarian thinking, and restriction of rights) and demonstrated that by identifying these mechanisms, and their effects, the existing level of inequality can be reduced, if so wished. The building of positive equity requires change in structures, professional mental models, and cross-sectoral cooperation in the service system. The project produced significant new theorizing for the arts fields in this light.
Project funder: Research Council of Finland (Consortium project, UniArts Helsinki).
Read more on the project webpages.
The Mind and the Other investigated the interaction of the human mind with phenomena considered to be supernatural, paranormal and otherworldly. The multidisciplinary project drew on collaboration between historical research, folkloristics, anthropology and psychiatry. An edited collection from the project, On the Edges of the Mind: Everyday Experiences of the Uncanny is available in Finnish.
Project funder and duration: Research Council of Finland, 2013-2016.
Read more about the project’s closing conference here.
This project evaluated the impacts of Turku city’s EVIVA leisure action plan (2011-2015). The EVIVA action plan aimed to promote preventative and stimulating leisure activities to city residents by developing leisure services, increasing participation and ultimately reducing social and health problems. Using qualitative research methods, the project examined the effects of the EVIVA action programme on 1) residents’ experiences of community, 2) cooperation within and between sectors in the leisure sector, as well as the emergence and sustainability of new operating methods, and 3) operating models for regional cooperation.
A report of the project can be found in Finnish here.
Project duration: 2015-2016.
The ‘Vulnerable Lives’ project focuses on different forms of vulnerability (e.g. disruptive life events, grief, illness and death) in contemporary Finnish society. We are equally interested in the ‘contemporary cures’ that people rely on when they need support. All human beings lead vulnerable lives and every society comes up with ‘cures’ that are supposed to help people deal with the inescapable fragility of life. Theoretically, our starting point is to take distance from sociological theory of action, which emphasizes individual autonomy and goal-oriented, intentional action. We approach agency as non-individual and ’embedded’ in social and material relations (e.g. neighborhood characteristics, medical technologies, pharmaseuticals) in the context of the so called ‘post-welfare state’. Our approach is ethnographic. The ‘Vulnerable Lives’ project focuses on different forms of vulnerability (e.g. disruptive life events, grief, illness and death) in contemporary Finnish society. We are equally interested in the ‘contemporary cures’ that people rely on when they need support. All human beings lead vulnerable lives and every society comes up with ‘cures’ that are supposed to help people deal with the inescapable fragility of life. Theoretically, our starting point is to take distance from sociological theory of action, which emphasizes individual autonomy and goal-oriented, intentional action. We approach agency as non-individual and ’embedded’ in social and material relations (e.g. neighborhood characteristics, medical technologies, pharmaseuticals) in the context of the so called ‘post-welfare state’. Our approach is ethnographic.
Project funder and duration: Research Council of Finland, 2013-2017 (University of Helsinki)
Read more on the project’s webpages.
The project promoted research on culture, art, health and wellbeing by mapping their theoretical and methodological intersections. The project assembled a steering group consisting of scientific experts and organized numerous workshops to map key research themes. In addition, an extensive research network was created and connections were made to artists working in the field, project workers and representatives of various administrative sectors (City of Turku, THL, TTL, OKM).The project produced a research programme justification memorandum, which was submitted to the Research Councils for Culture and Society and Health of the Academy of Finland. The work carried out in the project has continued in numerous projects and initiatives, one of the most important of which is the national contact point for culture and well-being, Taikusydän, and the Taikusydän researcher network, which are both coordinated by Turku University of Applied Sciences.
Project funder and duration: Turku2011 Foundation, 2012-2023
Read more about Taikusydän here.
The aim of the project was to analyse healthcare worker interactions and produce fundamental and detailed information on various aspects of multicultural encounters. The research for the project was carried out by Jenny Paananen with the support of Turku City Research and other funding. The research has been published in Jenny Paananen’s (2019) Finnish-language doctoral dissertation, Constructing mutual understanding in multicultural primary care consultations (University of Turku 2019).
Contact person: Jenny Paananen