Klara Bertils

Short presentation

My background is in linguistics and my research interests concern language and interaction as a means for meaning-making and social action in various institutional contexts. I have a particular interest in how people, in encounters with representatives of professional and volunteer well-fare institutions, relate to knowledge and experience.

Keywords

• conversation analysis
• social work
• medical interaction
• applied linguistics
• suicide prevention

Biography

I hold a PhD in Linguistics and am a researcher at the Department of Social Work.

My doctoral dissertation, Feber i interaktion. Kropp, kunskap och legitimitet i svenska primärvårdssamta (Fever in Interaction: Body, Knowledge, and Legitimacy in Swedish Primary Care Consultations), examines video-recorded conversations between patients and healthcare professionals. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the dissertation explores how patients and professionals relate to sensory experiences and clinical measurements, and who holds the authority to interpret and draw conclusions from a numerical result. The analysis reveals how patients may question and negotiate the meaning of clinical measurements, in cases in which their own experiences of the individual body contrast with medically established values a. In this way, patients’ unique and individual experiences may be proposed as an alternative framework to clinical guidelines for what is considered 'healthy' or 'normal.'

Currently, I am involved in the following research projects:

• Responding to Suicidality in Social Services: A Knowledge Inventory on Suicide Prevention in Aging and Disability, and
• Meaning-Making Conversations in Later Life: Developing Suicide-Preventive Support for Productive Responses to Older Adults on Telephone Helplines.

Previously, I have also researched how people make joint decisions in everyday life, during routine activities with friends and family.

I am a member of the research group SAMSA (Conversation in Social Work), the network UPSIDE (Uppsala Studies in Social Interaction and Discourse), and the interdisciplinary Conversation Lab at Uppsala University.

I teach the course Conversation and Communication in Social Work, and have also taught multimodal conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, and academic, professional, and creative writing.