Current Intersections of Culture, Language and Wellbeing
Current Intersections of Culture, Language and Wellbeing -etäseminaarisarja jatkuu!
Current Intersections of Culture, Language and Wellbeing on monitieteinen etäseminaarisarja, jota järjestää yhteistyössä kolme Turun yliopiston tutkimusverkostoa: LaWe, KULTVA sekä Kulttuurin ja terveyden tutkimusyksikkö. Seminaarisarjan tarkoituksena on laajentaa verkostoja ja tuoda yhteen kansainvälistä tutkimusta sosiaalitieteiden, humanististen tieteiden ja kielitieteiden saralla liittyen terveyteen ja hyvinvointiin. Seminaarisarja jatkuu Zoomissa. Pyydäthän linkin Zoom-tapaamiseen sähköpostilla kultva at utu piste fi.
Seminar series
Narratives of Illness and Recovery
October 12th, 16.00–18.00 (EEST / UTC+03:00), Zoom
NB! There is also a possibility to follow the seminar together in Publicum (Assistentinkatu 7), seminar room 399.
The online multidisciplinary seminar series Current Intersections of Culture, Language and Wellbeing continues!
The theme of our next seminar is Narratives of illness and recovery. In this seminar, we ask from a multidisciplinary perspective how people talk about different, sometimes contested, illnesses. How do we construct and share narratives related to illness and recovery? What do these narratives do and what is their role in different fields of interaction and communication?
In the seminar, two scholars will explore illness and recovery narratives from various perspectives. We will hear about and discuss recovery narratives as well as the experience of endometriosis and how it is shared in social media.
The seminar series Current Intersections of Culture, Language and Wellbeing is a multidisciplinary online seminar organized by three networks from the University of Turku, Finland: the Cultural Interaction Researcher Network KULTVA, the Centre of Language and Wellbeing (LaWe), and the Research Center for Culture and Health. The aim of the seminar is to foster international networking and research collaboration between social sciences, humanities, and linguistics, focusing on topics related to health and wellbeing.
Presentations:
Avril Tynan (University of Turku, Finland): Recovery Narratives: From Illness to Health?
Since trauma studies cemented the role of narrative as medicine and cure in the process of recovery from both psychic and physical illness, narrative has framed recovery as an objective event marked by the absence of symptoms or pathologies. This project aims to challenge how narrative is instrumentalized, commodified, and operationalized as evidence of recovery. One fundamental aspect of this work is to examine more closely how recovery itself does not relate a direct journey from illness to health (often framed as a story of “tragedy to triumph”) but problematizes understandings of illness and health in themselves.
Ida Melander (Örebro University, Sweden): Patient narratives on Instagram: sharing the experience of endometriosis
Traditionally, illness narratives have been approached through patient records or in researcher-elicited interviews. Recent changes in how we communicate about health and illness have, however, made experiences of being ill available to wider audiences. In this way, illness has become an increasingly public topic, discussed and shared in a multitude of settings. My presentation will focus on health communication in the form of illness narratives on a shared, activist Instagram account, where five women suffering from endometriosis narrate their illness. In the presentation, I will discuss these illness narratives in relation to both the multimodal affordances of the social media format, and the account’s organization as a shared space.