Project Details

The humanities include human and social sciences, cultural studies (philosophy, history, linguistics, religious studies, and literary studies) as well as the arts (literature, theatre, film, and visual arts). Internationally, Medical Humanities have outlined a broad spectrum of cultural and humanities research, teaching, and practice that go beyond a historical reflection on disease concepts since the 1960s. Their aim is to provide medical professionals with opportunities to reflect on their own work by means of creative activities and intellectual engagement with non-medical disciplines. Among other things, such endeavors can help to experience interdisciplinary collaboration or understand patients' perspectives.

The valuable humanities‘ perspective has been adopted by other fields; the Health Humanities, Psychological Humanities, and Nursing Humanities have emerged. Furthermore, the Critical Medical Humanities aim to strengthen humanities and social science perspectives within medicine by ma-king medicine itself the subject of critical inquiries and epistemological reflection.

The multidisciplinary field of Public Health can benefit from the potential of the Humanities on both theoretical-conceptual, methodological and practical levels: Public Health Humanities expand estab-lished public health fields (such as disease prevention, health promotion, and fair resource distri-bution) through philosophical and historical questions or the analysis of artistic works in which health and illness are represented. Since artistic works always consider the biographical and (psycho)social interactions of individuals and collectives, they negotiate health and disease as the result of social processes and power relations. Finally, public health often classifies health behavior as "good" or "bad" and thereby indirectly evaluates it morally. The values underlying these health norms can lead to understandings of "normality" and "deviation" that have so far been too little reflected within the discipline.

In this sense, the goal of the planned book is to illuminate the spectrum of different perspectives and questions as well as theoretical and methodological approaches of the Public Health Humani-ties without establishing a canon. The contributions address four overarching questions: 1. Why should Public Health engage with art and/or humanities research approaches? 2. What socially normative notions of health and illness are conveyed through art/media and how can these be analyzed? 3. How can art and humanities approaches contribute to the reflection on health-related discourses? 4. What impulses can the Public Health Humanities give to health promotion and pre-vention?

The volume, edited by Solveig Lena Hansen and Henning Schmidt-Semisch, will be published in German open access by Transcript at the end of 2025.