Research Project

Words for Care: Literature, Healthcare and Democracy (Kone Foundation, 2024–2026) 

In this project, we investigate the significance of fiction and shared reading in the social and healthcare sector, which is facing crises in a society that is becoming increasingly stratified. Social and healthcare professionals are required to possess multi-level skills in expression, reading, and listening as well as the ability to perceive and acknowledge different perspectives and to understand cultural and societal contexts, along with structures of power. As more and more healthcare professionals speak a language other than Finnish as their first language, the importance of these skills is further emphasized.

The starting point of our project is the idea, based on narrative medicine and cultural language learning research, that reading fiction together, and discussing and writing about what is read, supports individuals’ cultural, linguistic, and narrative competencies, as well as their sense of professional and societal belonging. The project expands literary and narrative research to the lives and work of professionals in different fields.

We develop applied literary research and create a new narrative medicine reading circle method, which can be utilized by healthcare professionals who speak Finnish both as a first or as a foreign language. We investigate, through interdisciplinary qualitative methods, the experiences of those participating in reading circles and the meanings they attribute to shared close reading of fiction and reflective writing.

Narrative medicine and cultural language learning methods have great potential to support narrative, cultural, and linguistic skills, which are also considered prerequisites for societal agency and democracy (Dewey; Rosenblatt; Nussbaum). The project brings together these perspectives for the first time and offers a new research-based way to address the transformation of the social and healthcare system and its impacts on society.

The project is implemented in cooperation with the Research Centre for Culture and Health at the University of Turku, the Health, Narrative and the Arts project at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, and Narrare, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University.

Our project members are:

Viola Parente-Čapková (PI), University of Turku; Laura Karttunen, Tampere University; Niina Kekki, University of Turku; Riitta Jytilä, University of Turku; Anna Ovaska, Tampere University; Elina Renko, Uniarts Helsinki; Alexandra Salmela, Tampere; Sonja Sulkava, University of Helsinki; Jussi Valtonen, Uniarts Helsinki.