Gita Siliņa, recipient of the first AABS Aina Birnitis Dissertation-Completion Fellowship in the Humanities for Latvia, is a Ph.D Candidate in Communications Science at the University of Latvia. The fellowship will support the completion of her thesis which examines the interaction between popular literature and the Latvian national identity. In her research, Gita asks “What’s really going on at the time of reading a popular novel? What are the reader’s personal experiences related to this process and how the reader links forms of everyday life experiences?”
To answer that question, I combine various methods, including surveys, ethnographic research, and in-depth interviews with experts in literature, mass media, socio-anthropology and culture fields in Latvia. Using a mixed method approach, the quantitative information provides “hard data,” which is responsible for reliability and validity, while qualitative data adds a deeper understanding of research results and the possibility “to feel” more nuanced information. In order to obtain data on the reading habits of popular novels and the literacy of literature, I carried out a survey of readers by distributing questionnaires in several libraries of the Vidzeme region – Madonas district, Cēsis district, Valmieras district – in the summer of 2013.
Gita’s PhD thesis will demonstrate how Latvian national identity is connected to popular literature and how these processes are influenced by social memory and other social, political, economic and cultural processes. Her work will make new contributions to the interdisciplinary fields of communication, literary studies and Latvian social history.