Health & Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine

CIRAC researchers use literary, art, cultural, media, social science, and philosophical approaches to analyze intersectional concepts such as health and illness, care and care cultures, age, disability and the politics of the body. Questions of hegemonic power (including biopolitics in the sense of Foucault's approaches) and social justice are taken into account in the investigations of the various epistemologies, as are queer-feminist, care-ethical and medical-ethical approaches.

Researchers at CIRAC are currently working on various projects on the perception, representation, and shaping of vulnerability and resilience, frailty, dementia, palliative care, long-term care and dying, death and mourning, as well as on illness narratives ("illness pathographies"), and representations of the healthcare system, such as in the context of old-age narratives or the portrayal of doctors in film and literature.

Our cooperation partners include the German Network for Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities Research Center Innsbruck.