What I am learning as I start reading interview transcripts.

I created this website as part of a research project to find out more about how nurses understand and make use of arts and humanities in their work. In 2023 I was successful in getting grant funding to go ahead with it. Since then, along with two graduate research assistants, Randip Dhaliwal and Davey Hamada (both PhD students in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary), we are about halfway to our goal of interviewing 20 participants. 

So far it is about 80% nurses in clinical practice (some of whom are also graduate students) and 20% educators. I am pleased about that because I thought in planning this study that one of the gaps in the “literature” is about nurses who actually practice. What is published not surprisingly comes almost exclusively from academics who – like me – have a theoretical interest in humanities and nursing or who – also like me – have tried applying arts and humanities in teaching and research. A lot of this activity skirts around the problem I started to address in my book of how do we first show that there even is such a thing as “nursing and humanities” ie, combinations of the two that work and have meaning, and then how we can talk about it, whether describing it, explaining it, or promoting it (or all of the above, which is the goal of the project). If humanities do not have significance in nursing practice, by which I mean clinical practice, not secondary supporting practices of education, research, or management, then they are at best a take-it-or-leave-it option for nurses who happen to have an interest (and if that is the case, they are probably still worth taking a good look at).

One of the interviews was with a nurse working in oncology. What makes this interview stand out is that she found it quite difficult to explain why and how humanities are important in her work. In a way, that gets at the problem better than others who have decided ideas about their own uses of arts and humanities. This nurse, like others, used the term humanities quite loosely and almost interchangeably with humanity. How these terms work together is one of the questions I have when I see them in the health humanities literature. Both can be defined in many ways. But if one version of humanities is an image of 60s brutalist office blocks with signs over the door for university departments, “History,” “Modern Languages,” “Fine Arts” and so on, one version of humanity is a vast river delta where it meets the sea, a broad current of connotative virtue. It is impossible to hold down either sense of either word for long; better to sense the pull between the desire for definition and the allure of wholeness. (One way of thinking about this contrast is by mapping it to Charles Taylor’s “designative-instrumental” and “expressive constitutive” theories of language (Taylor, 2016, p. 48). What is occurring in the space in between humanities and humanity, in terms of what we have in this, and other interviews?

There is something to the idea that there are qualities of relating that people find important in nurse-patient encounters that have to do with “humanity” and therefore also with “humanities.” The part of the interview that sticks in my mind and which struck me forcefully when I went back and read it is about a nurse-patient encounter. The patient was a younger woman seriously ill with cancer, by herself in a single room. During a routine encounter, checking in, taking vital signs, she complained about the drabness of the room. The nurse, following an un-prescribable impulse, asked her what her favourite colour was. Yellow. They then talked about colours and the patient said she liked Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Following this conversation, the nurse found, and made, pictures of sunflowers and stuck them up in the patient’s room. Initial thoughts about this interaction I have:

• The patient was seen and heard; her environment was made better.
• There was an aleatory element outside of what is necessary within the bounds of treatment and nursing care. 
• There between the office block and the delta.

Reference

Taylor, C. (2016). The language animal: The full shape of the human linguistic capacity. Belknap Harvard University Press.

This project draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.