“Amplitude of human experience”: The relational wellbeing potential of shared reading

Abstract

Amid rising social fragmentation, loneliness, and pervasive inequities, practices that invite people to gather, listen, and imagine together carry renewed urgency. Shared reading – small groups convened to read aloud and discuss literature – is one such practice. This dissertation investigates the relational wellbeing potential of participation in shared reading and asks: what happens when people come together around a literary text, and how might those happenings enable participants to be, become, and stay well with one another?

Guided by a transformative-relational paradigm, the research unfolds in two interwoven phases. Phase One, a scoping review and thematic synthesis of empirical studies and organizational reports, maps what is already known about the key elements (the literary text, facilitator, group, and atmosphere) and the relational processes (intersubjective engagement, expanded boundaries of self, collective wondering, and (in)articulation) of shared reading. Phase Two, a poetic inquiry rooted in conversations with shared reading participants, attends to the lived, affective textures of participation in shared reading. Participant-voiced poems, set alongside poems woven from theoretical companions, illuminate how the cultivated liminal space of shared reading, with the literary text at the center, engenders practices of recognition and listening otherwise (Lipari, 2009, within which expressions of relational wellbeing emerge.

Together, these phases reveal shared reading as an assemblage of heterogeneous components, dynamically configured in ways that open possibilities for resonant relations of wellbeing. Relational wellbeing emerges not as an individual outcome but as a collective, contingent, ongoing process requiring attention to the infrastructures of resonance: the spaces, practices, and facilitators that allow people to encounter and respond to one another and the world with openness, curiosity, and care.

This dissertation offers contributions to theory by extending and refining theories of resonance and relational wellbeing; to methodology through a layered inquiry that foregrounds relationality not only as an object of study but also as a mode of research; and to practice and policy by proposing insights to strengthen shared reading as a vital public practice for cultivating connection, attention, and care. This work gathers concepts, stories, and voices to hold open the relational possibilities that shared reading makes possible.