124070 VO Culture, Society and the Media (2024S)

Various media ranging from 17th century broadsheets to contemporary social platforms like TikTok have contributed to the development of the public sphere of health information. This fundamental intertwining of medical practice, representational traditions, and health politics will constitute the focus of this lecture. The convener, along with a handful of invited guests, will provide an overview of some of the patterns, developments, and characteristics of contemporary and historical visual cultures and health.
We will ask how medical concepts such as health, disease, illness, and healing have been made visible through and in a variety of media. We will also inquire in how far discourses around body, gender, ethnicity, class or age have informed these visual and medical practices and how these have been used by various organizations and corporations to promote their ideologies. These questions will be accompanied by more fundamental queries concerning identity and ethics in the media. In order to offer a more in-depth discussion of stigmatization, representation, power hierarchies and everyday cultures, we will closely look at sexuality and sexual health through the lens of the visual cultures that have been produced around these concepts and practices.
This is a Cultural Studies lecture that draws inspiration from Medical and Health Humanities. Whereas, often, Medical Humanities courses concentrate on literature and written narratives, this lecture goes beyond such a narrow focus to include a variety of media/arts and sciences.
The lecture will be a presence-lecture with some online sessions.

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