Medical Humanities is an emerging interdisciplinary field of research that aims to explore the global social, political, economic and cultural aspects of medicine, health and illness as well as their public treatment and negotiation. By combining medical, humanities and social science perspectives, the medical humanities offer, for example, the opportunity to better understand the significance and scope of modern medicine for individual life and social coexistence. They can also help to do greater justice to the various dimensions of diversity in medicine, nursing and healthcare and to understand and criticise forms of discrimination and ongoing exclusion and exploitation in the healthcare sector.

The University of Oldenburg offers excellent conditions for research and networking activities in the field of medical humanities. For example, in the humanities and social sciences in the fields of postcolonial studies, gender studies, disability studies, intersectionality and diversity research, questions of heterogeneity and difference under migration society and postcolonial conditions are researched in the university research focus "Diversity and Participation" and cultural and social science questions on the practices of diagnosis are dealt with at the Scientific Centre "Genealogy of the Present" (WiZeGG). At the same time, with its mission statement "Healthcare4all", its pronounced interdisciplinary orientation, the university clinics located in four cooperating hospitals, the strongly positioned healthcare research and relevant joint projects such as the DFG research group "Medicine and the Time Structure of a Good Life" LINK, University Medicine Oldenburg offers excellent starting conditions for corresponding co-operation.

The Medical Humanities@Oldenburg initiative is committed to leveraging and developing this potential through cross-faculty networking and co-operation in research and teaching. Possible starting points are, for example the development of diversity-sensitive healthcare in the north-west (DiVerso project); the consideration of diversity in the course of the digital transformation of the healthcare system; the diversity-sensitive training of medical staff and other healthcare professions; research into social and global inequalities in the development and distribution of medical resources; the role of narratives and sociotechnological ideas in the acceptance of biotechnological innovations; epigenetics, social inequality and critical race studies; language, literature and narrative medicine; reproductive medicine, biopolitics and migration; inclusion and disability studies.