“Caregiving and literature as remedium” (CaReLit) is an interdisciplinary research project that explores care and the caregiving role in and through Scandinavian contemporary literature, including graphic literature and children and young adults’ literature. Its main objective is to investigate the ethical and existential frameworks surrounding caregivers, in particular family caregivers without a professional background, discuss how they relate to the roles of the person receiving care and healthcare services, and suggest methods through which literature can be used in health promoting work and education.

CaReLit asks the following research questions:

• How are care and caregivers portrayed in Scandinavian contemporary literature, including graphic literature (comics, picture books and visually dominated literature)?
• What kind of insights into care and caregiving are literary expressions particularly suitable to convey?
• Why are these insights meaningful in a health-promoting perspective, and how can literary expressions be used in relation to care and caregiving within healthcare services and in education?

Three senses of the word remedium – remedy, tool, (re-)mediation – serve as an analytical key to the literary texts and frame the project’s methodical and theoretical approach. The first two senses are contained in the word’s etymology: Remedium is a latin phrase connecting re- and mederi (to heal), which is connected to two meanings: “remedy” and “tool”. Both meanings indicate that literature has instrumental functions and can serve as means to an extraliterary end. The third sense is connected to medium and remediation and points towards the aesthetic dimension of literature. Qualities connected to media, and the intermedial networks they participate in through remediations, are fundamental to the meanings literary texts produce. As a concept, remedium encompasses the tools with which we approach literary texts, the uses we put them to, and the ways in which literary texts produce and reproduce meaning and cultural conceptions. By exploring all of these aspects, the project aims to make an important contribution to our understanding of how contemporary literature facilitates knowledge, education and critical discussion about care and caregiving.

CaReLit is financed by Faculty of Humanities and NTNU Health at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and connected to the knowledge area Health promotion, prevention and empowerment.

The project involves two research groups, The Research Group for Graphic Literature (GraL) and Research group for Literature and Society.

Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt introduced remedium as a concept in her article

«Når nasjonens likevekt rystes. En komparativ analyse av kanonlitteraturens rolle etter terrorangrep» (2019) in Edda, 106, 294-307. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1500-1989-2019-04-05.

Silje Haugen Warberg published the article «Apostrofere den levende. Den pårørendes vitnemål om autisme i Olaug Nilssens Tung tids tale» (2017) in Kultur & klasse, 49(131), 59-80. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7146/kok.v49i131.127483

The podcast Litt.Snakk interviewed Silje Haugen Warberg in their episode «Sykdom og pårørenderollen i litteraturen».