Creating the valuable: reading as a matter of health and successful parenthood

ABSTRACT

There have been increasing demands to improve Swedish children’s reading habits, triggered by poor PISA results in 2013, and public healthcare has stepped in as a strong reading-promoting actor. Drawing on the emerging field of valuation research in STS, the paper explores the values enacted in health-related information brochures about reading that are distributed to all Swedish parents at various times of their children’s lives. The analysis demonstrates how the lack of reading books is enacted as a public health problem that requires prevention and intervention of public healthcare. Health is thus recruited as a stabilising actor in the process of determining the value and importance of reading and where the problem of non-reading of books becomes a private matter for families to solve. The analysis also shows how instances of health-promoting intentions of doing good can in effect be marginalising by viewing specific people as less valuable.

KEYWORDS:

• Reading
• valuation studies
• actor-network theory
• folded valuations
• science and technology studies (STS)

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Ninni Wahlström and Johan Öhman and the research colleagues in SMED both in Örebro and Uppsala, for careful readings and thoughtful comments. I also especially want to thank Hedvig Gröndal, Hanna Hofverberg, Lina Rahm, Ásgeir Tryggvason and Emma Vikström. I gratefully acknowledge the Discourse reviewers for their helpful and inspiring feedback on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A new public library act further elucidates the public libraries’ mission to strengthen ‘the position of literature and the interest in Bildung, enlightenment, education, research and cultural activities’ (Swedish Arts Council, 2015, p. 3, my translation).

2. http://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Country/note/Sweden.pdf

3. http://www.kulturradet.se/sv/Lasframjande/Bokstart-gammal/; http://www.kulturradet.se/sv/Lasframjande/Lasambassadoren/; http://www.kulturradet.se/sv/Lasframjande/Idrott/

4. National guidelines for children’s healthcare (http://www.rikshandboken-bhv.se/Kategori/Barnhälsovårdsprogrammet)

5. Personal communication with nurses at two Swedish BVC clinics, August 18, 2017 and October 5, 2017.

6. I translated the quotes from both the ABC brochures and the Parents’ Handbook.

7. See endnote 4.

8. This can be downloaded in Swedish (https://www.aktivskola.org/kunskapsbanken/#/Hälsa).

9. I was unable to trace the cited research.

10. However, it was possible to trace the same idea about reading to studies conducted in the 1980s (Cunningham & Stanovich, 2001), where unusual words were counted in different media and ways of communication. The studies indicated there were more unusual words in children’s books than in normal adult talk and other media, for example, TV talk.

11. On pedagogisation, see Depaepe, Herman, Surmont, Van Gorp, & Simon, 2008.

12. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-for-development/

13. Some examples of different videos showing versions of these quantifications are as follows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KCVXdyjQXU; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1nzc9P5MSA&t=44s; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wud_Qv22dFs&t=257s; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSULIvTNKOE&t=10s; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp4_nEw2RQI

14. Around 35% of the parents stated that they read to their children every day. However, and this is not mentioned in the Parents’ Handbook, another 30% reported doing the activity several times a week. Additionally, the 2012 survey (a private initiative) was web based, while the 2003 survey (a government initiative) was conducted through phone interviews, making them hard to compare.