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.
Since the summer semester of 2026, we have been offering one of the first Health Humanities study programmes in the German-speaking world.
Read more: here.
In this inter-faculty Master's module, we examine concepts such as health and illness, ageing, care, and the politics of the body from an intersectional perspective, based on approaches from the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies. The Master's module aims to provide students of all disciplines with a critical-scientific perspective on the social constructions of health and illness, their artistic representations, and their concrete societal manifestation. Particularly in healthcare-related professions, but also in education and human resource management, such an expanded perspective on health and illness, on potentials and health crises throughout the life course, as well as on the design of health and social structures, enables a more appropriate understanding of current societal challenges and thus helps to actively shape processes of societal transformation.
