Embodiment and Critical Medical Humanities

How can we consider “the body” and “bodies” in all their individuality? How can the value of individual experiences, of affects and sensual structures, of embodiment in medical contexts be taken into account? How can the hidden strategies of normalization be addressed with the aim of achieving a more just perspective? These are some of the central questions and concerns of this book. It questions medical humanities as a truly interdisciplinary field in which the traditional oppositions of biomedicine’s explainable physical body and the humanities’ hermeneutic dimensions might be critically challenged: In a series of in-depth conversations with the editors of this volume, Angela Woods, Erin Manning, Monica Greco, Ana Gómez-Carrillo, and Siri Hustvedt discuss their completed, ongoing, and future interdisciplinary projects; their still-unwritten books-to-come; their non-academic research designs and experimental research spaces; and their embodied thinking and teaching practices.

Cornelius Borck, Director of the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies (IMGWF), University of Lubeck. Ana Gómez-Carrillo, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal.Monica Greco, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. Siri Hustvedt, writer, lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Céline Kaiser, Professor for Media cultural studies and Scenic research, University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Ottersberg and co-director of IMHAR Institute for Medical & Health Humanities and Artistic Research. Erin Manning, Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is also the founder of the laboratory SenseLab. Christina Schües, Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies (IMGWF), University of Lubeck. Sophie Witt, Professor at the Institute for Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Hamburg; Visiting Scholar at the IMGWF in 2021. Angela Woods, Professor of Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies, Durham University.

Strengthening and expanding the medical humanities in research and teaching