Health & Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine
Health & Medical Humanities are an interdisciplinary field that can be located at the interface between the arts, social sciences and humanities and health science and medical theories. Health and illness are not understood as categories to be defined in purely clinical-medical terms or as binary opposites, but are instead perceived in their complexity, for example through the lens of disability studies. Particular importance is attached to the socio-cultural dimensions of health and illness: from a critical-constructivist perspective, they are viewed primarily as part of cultural practice.
Both collective ideas (social imaginaries, dispositives) and individual perceptions and their narrative negotiation play a major role in the analysis of the epistemologies underlying the various concepts and the investigation of the interactions between medical/health science forms of knowledge production, socio-political framework conditions and cultural representations (literature and art, film, theater, media).
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.
Specifically, 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.
Narrative Medicine enables practitioners and researchers to expand their repertoire of methods with experiences and insights from the humanities. The aim is to better adapt healthcare practice and structures to individuals and their personal experiences, life situations and narratives.
Our cooperation partners include the German Network for Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities Research Center Innsbruck.
Current research projects
The role of philosophical reflection in the development of a culture of care and knowledge of dying