Speaker: Krystyna Wieszczek
Affiliation: Columbia University, University of Verona
Title: Empowerment: Conceptual and Methodological Explorations of the Effects of Reading
Abstract (long version below): Diverse practitioners have sought to leverage, and researchers to understand, the potential social impacts of literature. To elucidate the intuitively perceived transformative potential of literature, researchers have often turned to interdisciplinary and empirical studies. Such studies have examined different modalities of reading and frequently find that literature can have prosocial effects, such as reducing symptoms of dementia and depression and enhancing social cognition and empathy. The paper discusses the key objectives and progress of LIFE, a research project that aims to empirically investigate whether reading literature can also enhance empowerment, particularly for readers from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Long abstract
For some time, practitioners have sought to leverage, and researchers to understand, the potential social impacts of literature. Medical professionals are encouraged to incorporate narrative medicine in their practice, some doctors in the UK prescribed books to patients and some criminal offenders in the USA participated in alternative sentencing programs in which they discuss literature. To elucidate the intuitively perceived transformative potential of literature, researchers have often turned to interdisciplinary and empirical studies. These studies draw on fields such as literature, psychology, sociology, communication, linguistics and neuroscience, and employ experimental or naturalistic methods, ranging from remotely administered surveys, eye-tracking experiments and think aloud protocols to lab-based physiological tests and CT and fMRI scans. Such studies have examined different modalities of reading, for example, shared reading and individual reading, reading fiction and non-fiction, and reading on screen as opposed to reading on paper, among others. Results frequently suggest that literary reading may have prosocial effects, such as reducing symptoms of dementia and depression (shared reading and encouraging re-appraisal and meta-cognition) as well as enhancing social cognition and empathy, which may extend beyond oneās own culture. Additionally, such studies propose that literature can inspire changes in oneās perspective and encourage deeper self-reflection and self-understanding, fostering a willingness to modify personality traits.
The current research project titled LIFE, LIterature For Empowerment, aims to empirically investigate whether reading literature can also enhance an individualās sense of empowerment, particularly for readers from underserved backgrounds who often face disempowering influences in their environment. Can literature help readers satisfy the universal basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness ? Can it inspire individuals to transcend limiting beliefs and pursue dreams they might have otherwise abandoned or never considered? In doing so, can it possibly help readers improve their life choices, life satisfaction and overall wellbeing?
This paper will discuss the projectās vision and progress. It will provide an overview of its three key objectives: 1) developing a cross-disciplinary mixed method methodology to measure the potential impact of reading literature on empowerment, based on questionnaires and a semi-structured interview to detect potential change in the level of empowerment; 2) establishing an āempowerment canonā of literary works in prose selected by experts such as authors, critics, literary scholars, psychologists, educators, and other reading specialists, which can be particularly useful for raising readersā awareness of disempowering influences in their environment and fostering empowerment to counter their effects; and 3) testing the tool in controlled experiments with young readers aged 18-26 from diverse backgrounds in the USA and Italy. The paper will also outline the tentative conceptual and operational definitions of empowerment, as well as the accompanying methodology.