Speaker: Olivia Fialho @ofialho
Affiliation: Utrecht University, Huygens Institute / Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences
Title: Moral Residue Reading Experiences Among Healthcare Professionals: A Computational Cognitive Poetics Analysis
Abstract: We explore the significance of narratives in medical education, focusing on quantitative and qualitative research that highlights the impact of narratives on empathy training, end-of-life care situations, and moral residue experiences (i.e., a common experience among healthcare professionals and other moral agents when they perceive their own failure to meet moral requirements, despite others’ tendency not to blame them). Four papers present research conducted with the aim of reshaping the use of narrative in medical education. They describe the impact of fiction and nonfiction-labeled literary narratives, various types of narrative engagement, first-person narratives, fiction seminars, and transformative reading interventions.
Long abstract
The aim of this paper is to offer a description of the poetics of moral residue reading experiences among health care practitioners. Moral residue has been described as situations of unavoidable and unblameworthy moral failure. Two interview sessions with 30 health care practitioners were conducted. Participants were pre-selected on the basis of having lived through moral residue situations at the workplace. Both interview sessions followed a phenomenological interview schedule designed to gain access to how participants describe their subjective experiences of reading. In the first session, participants read (self-)selected text extracts from world literature related to moral residue. To practice, they talked about the most recent book they had read. Their most meaningful reading experiences were explored. In the second session, one participant-selected story was reread, with a focus on five evocative passages. This study focuses on an extract of the first interview session, where participants talked both about the most recent book read as well as a self-selected moral residue book. Computational data analysis was performed to assess both corpora, where both keywords and keywords in context were assessed. Statistical differences were found between the two corpora, enabling an initial description of the cognitive poetics of moral residue reading experiences. I will argue that the poetics of moral residue reading experiences resembles the poetics of extended enactment, as described by Fialho (2024), providing a fuller description of how literary reading impacts and modifies readers’ moral self-constructs.