KNOWIT: Knowledge in Translation
Since 2011, I lead KNOWIT, an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Oslo that examines how medical knowledge is produced, interpreted and put into practice.
Our approach brings medical knowledge translation and implementation science into dialogue with humanistic translation studies. We partly work within biomedical genres—including systematic reviews, clinical guidelines and patient information—to investigate how evidence acquires meaning and authority, whose experiences it represents and what changes as it moves between settings.
Our research centres on three interconnected areas.
Home, belonging and care
What happens when the hospital enters the home? In HOMESICK, we investigate hospital-at-home services for migrant populations, exploring how care can respond to different experiences of home, family and belonging.
Drawing on Barbara Cassin’s understanding of home as a lived experience, we examine how language, technologies, material conditions and family relationships shape the provision of care. Working with patients, families and healthcare professionals, we explore how services can be adapted to support safety and dignity while respecting what makes a home meaningful to those who live there.
Narratives in evidence and decision-making
How can the same research support different recommendations? We examine how narrative structures shape systematic reviews, clinical guidelines and public debates, including controversies over abortion, puberty blockers and embryo selection in IVF.
This work investigates how evidence is selected and organised, how problems and responsibilities are defined, and how particular courses of action become credible. It includes my collaboration with Mona Baker on Beyond the Bedside, which develops a narrative model of knowledge translation in reproductive health.
Health communication, narrative and AI
How can health communication respond to the experiences and concerns of those it addresses? We study how people interpret health information and how health literacy interventions can support understanding, critical judgement and participation in care.
An emerging strand examines how artificial intelligence represents and transforms patients’ stories. In Ambient scribes as narrative technologies, published in The Lancet with Kirsten Ostherr and Angela Woods, I explore how AI-generated clinical notes reshape patients’ accounts, with consequences for how their experiences are understood and acted upon. This work informs our wider inquiry into how digital tools can be designed and evaluated with attention to patient perspectives, narrative context and uncertainty.
Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE)
I co-founded and directed SHE, the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education at the University of Oslo, funded as a national Centre of Excellence in Education for the period 2020–2026. SHE developed and studied educational approaches that helped future health professionals engage critically with sustainability and its implications for care.
Our work explored how commitments to individual patients intersect with responsibilities for social justice, global equity and the health of future generations. We examined how sustainability was understood and taught, whose perspectives informed it, and how students learned to navigate tensions between competing needs and values.
In our article Teaching sustainable health care through the critical medical humanities, published in The Lancet, we described an educational approach that encouraged students to question the assumptions underpinning sustainability agendas and engage with the conflicts and compromises involved in pursuing a just and sustainable future.
This approach informed our teaching methods. In critical datathons, students and collaborators analysed policy documents, clinical records and patient testimonies through narrative, conceptual and data-based inquiry. We also developed the Sustainability and Health Corpus, enabling students and researchers to investigate how key concepts are used across texts and contexts.
Through these activities, we connected sustainability education with the interpretive judgement, narrative sensitivity and collaborative inquiry involved in compassionate care.
