Over the last decades, the medical and health humanities have established themselves as vibrant interdisciplinary fields. Responding to these developments, the series seeks to encourage further innovation by stressing three points.
First, in looking at health and illness as a spectrum of cultural practices, it sets out to spotlight both individual and collective experiences. With that, it draws attention to the questions of inequality and social justice and expands the purview of current research to include more-than-human subjects, entanglements, and perspectives.
Second, it aims to broaden the current cultural and geographical scope beyond Western cultures and Western medicine to address different cultural and medical imaginaries as they can be found, for instance, in the Global South and Eastern Europe.
Third, it emphasizes the historical and aesthetic dimensions of the expression of illness experience. With this, it draws attention to a variety of forms and media used in this context and decidedly goes beyond the narrow focus on illness narratives. This attention to the aesthetic dimension of medical and health humanities has significant consequences on the methodological level, since it opens up new spaces for conversations between media analysis, artistic practice, and empirical research.
Encompassing monographs, edited collections, and critical explorations either in English or German, the peer-reviewed series offers ground-breaking interventions into the field, well-focused multidisciplinary dialogues as well as in-depth, methodologically and theoretically innovative studies.