The Health and Humanities Group takes a qualitative approach to research, with a special interest in how inequality affects citizens’ experiences with healthcare professionals, systems and services. It has been well-documented that marginalized groups of citizens are disadvantaged when it comes to benefiting from the resources offered by a universal coverage healthcare system such as Denmark’s. As linguists, hermeneuticians and rhetoricians, we share an interest in the ways that language may present obstacles as well as solutions to improving citizens’ access to healthcare resources. A key focus for many group members is the issue of comprehensibility in the communication between healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients. By focusing on the communication between medical experts and lay citizens (as patients), the pitfalls of this communication and the linguistic resources of patients become an opportunity to determine the extent to which patients benefit from the information, advice and instructions provided by HCPs. Thus, our research in the Health and Humanities Group collectively aims to support and explore the role of language in healthcare inequality in various ways.

Research projects:

- One project focuses on written documents containing information and/or instructions for patients. Since such patient-oriented texts are in many cases rewritten versions of longer, specialized medical texts, the project investigates the various popularization strategies underlying the textual derivation.

- Another project investigates comprehensibility in written documents aimed at patients. This project has two different research foci: One is register, or ‘level of style’. Because the knowledge or information communicated in these texts usually originates in longer expert-oriented sources (see above), elements of specialized language tend to find their way into texts aimed at patients, despite the fact that such registerially inappropriate elements jeopardize comprehensibility. Thus, this aspect of the project is concerned with registerial (dis)harmony in these texts. The other focus is textual coherence. An insufficient degree of coherence is a source of confusion in any text, and since a number of patient-oriented text genres are ‘patchworks’ of information items from specialized sources (see above), such texts do not always achieve a proper degree of coherence.

- Yet another research project is interested in health inequality in relation to non-native Danish speakers in the healthcare system – both healthcare providers and patients.

- One future project investigates HCP-patient encounters where vulnerable citizens are accompanied by a healthcare student volunteer who acts as an intermediary/communicator between the HPC and the patient.

The student volunteer’s role in these encounters is to make sure that the patient understands the HCP’s information and instructions.

 

The Communicating Organizations (ComOrg) interest group is dedicated to identifying, analyzing, and discussing current issues relating to the communicative practices of organizing. We are interested in problem-based, reflexive approaches to examining organizational communication. 

We embrace two major research perspectives: on the one hand, we view organizations as social entities that are constantly being constructed in communication. On the other hand, we view organizations as actors and objects of communication. This complementarity of views allows us to conduct problem-driven and critical organizational communication research exploring all aspects of organizational life, including the discursive construction of identity, relationship, membership and culture, from ideologies of communication and instantiations of communicative practice to socio-cultural practices, and from social responsibility and the political communication of organizations to public relations. Methodologically speaking, we support a wide range of methods – albeit gravitating towards studies of a qualitative nature – and we conduct in-depth empirical studies as well as conceptual research. Consequently, we contribute to several types of research literature and fields of study. We aim to contribute to the broad fields of organizational communication and culture, corporate communication, social media communication, and critical management studies. 

Current research and collaborations include many different activities including grant funded networking efforts, collaborating with colleagues at AAU and other institutions, hosting a ‘Dark Side’ of Organizational Communication conference/symposium, and teaching in our areas of expertise beyond our Bachelor‘s and Master’s programs.   

For instance, we received a multi-year DFF Networking grant bringing scholars together from Denmark, Sweden, Canada, and the United States to discuss and explore issues related to organizational sustainability, well-being and meaningfulness. The grant description explains: 

Employees are key to corporate growth; however, how we are socialized into the organization is moving away from adaptation and assimilation, and towards the acknowledgement of individual needs and self-care. Recognizing this trend, the network seeks to reconceptualize organizational socialization (OS), taking it out of the social sciences and into the humanities. It does so by taking a bottom-up approach focusing on the employee and relating their socialization and well-being to corporate goals of e.g. development and innovation. This means focusing on topics on the macro level (local and global societal trends influencing OS in organizations, incl. employee identities and sensibilities); the meso level (organizational culture, socialization, practice, and innovation); and the micro level (employee power, agency, identity, and communication). The objective is to phrase new important questions in OS research, reframe and reconceptualize OS, and to share new knowledge with practitioners. 

(DFF Id grant: 10.46540/3186-00026B) 

 

We are also collaborating with colleagues at Aalborg University and with businesses in Northern Denmark exploring what we refer to as ‘Social Organizational Sustainability’ exploring issues of sustainability as it relates to organizations and organizing.  

As a group focused on critical studies of organizational communication, we coordinate and host a semi-regular, international and interdisciplinary conference on the ‘Dark Side’ of organizational communication. Inspired by Diane Vaughan’s phrase “the dark side of organizations,” the conference offers specific attention on the mundane, hidden, and often taken-for-granted aspects of organizational communication and discourse in practice.   

We are involved in sharing our expertise beyond AAU by publishing in trade journals, teaching PhD courses, and participating in various lecture series when possible. For instance, we have members participating in the Danish ‘Book a Scientist’ initiative offering public lectures in the community. 

The Language interest group consists of members who are all interested in languages and linguistics from various perspectives. We work primarily with Danish, English, German, and Spanish, and our research spans core linguistic disciplines, such as syntax, morphology, semantics, phonetics, and phonology, as well as more applied disciplines relating to the social and psychological aspects of language, such as genre and register, socio-onomastics, language and identity, language and culture, language variation, language change, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and language teaching.  

As our interests show, we are a diverse group, and we work primarily individually, in pairs or smaller constellations, and with external collaborators. Our collaborators include researchers at University of Canterbury (NZ), University of Amsterdam (NL), Aarhus University, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munic (DE), and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (DE). Members of the project German as an additional competence (see list of current projects below) are active in the ‘Nationale netværk for fremmedsprogsundervisere’, collaborate with ‘Det Nationale Center for Fremmedsprog’ and, in general, collaborate with colleagues from Danish educational institutions working with Language Boost and Language as an Additional Competence. 

The Languages Interest Group provides a forum for us to discuss our shared interests and develop collaborative projects. The interest group is also a forum for peer feedback on manuscripts, oral presentations, and funding applications.  

Members of the Languages Interest Group function as editors for the international, peer-reviewed, open access journal Globe: A Journal of Language, Culture and Communication.

Current projects within the group includes:

• English oral proficiency in Danish high schools
  • While Danes generally have a very high proficiency in English, some studies indicate that upper-secondary high school students, while proficient in English, are not participating orally in class. This project focuses on the use of English and Danish in the English-language classroom in Danish upper-secondary schools and looks at a variety of factors, including domain-specific language use (e.g. grammar vs. literary analysis) and learning activities (group work vs. teacher talk) as well as pupils’ willingness to communicate in English. Further studies in this project may include the consideration of translanguaging in the classroom.
    
    
• Word-final voicing in English among non-native speakers of English
  • This project is based on previous work comparing word-final voicing in English among Danish and Dutch speakers (perception study) and looks at how findings from second language perception research might be disseminated to e.g upper-secondary school teachers and turned into teaching materials. A further step within this project is the inclusion of experiments on university students in English who have expressed an interest in becoming upper-secondary school teachers.
    
    
• German as an additional competence
  • The project group deals with issues concerning the teaching and learning of German as an additional competence. The context of the research includes university students who are learning German as a foreign language (L2). The main interests of the group are themes such as motivation, persistence, needs analysis, learning goals, target situations and L2 anxiety. We focus on interviews and text/document analysis. The aim of the group is to explore the learning of German as an additional competence at universities by analysing problems associated with it and contributing to appropriate solutions. Current work includes articles on learning goals, target situations, students’ needs, motivation, and persistence in courses in German as an additional competence. Future projects include studies on the perception of the need for grammar and the role of play and games in learning German as an additional competence. In order to give access to the results of our research, we aim for shorter, practice-oriented articles which are read by scholars in the field of L2 and LOTE ("Languages other than English") and by language teachers as well as longer, exploring articles. The results of the research is fed back into the language courses of German as an Additional Competence at AAU.