In view of social change, changing gender roles and increased migration, the topic of "diversity" is also becoming increasingly important in medicine and healthcare. There are now numerous concepts for diversity-sensitive healthcare that is geared towards the diversity of needs, orientations and life situations and is designed to address the specific problems and vulnerabilities of marginalised groups of people. However, such services are generally associated with a metropolitan-metropolitan environment. In contrast, there is a lack of comparable approaches for the specific circumstances in rural areas. In public debates, it is often said to have a low level of diversity awareness or even a rejection of diversity. At the same time, however, there are also unexpected forms of diversity in practice that defy the usual political and ideological fronts and discourse patterns.

The project aims to promote approaches to diversity-sensitive healthcare for rural areas. To this end, it combines healthcare research, medical ethics and cultural and social science research perspectives to examine how diversity is experienced, evaluated and practised in specific healthcare contexts and how the relationship between diversity and rurality is discursively constructed and negotiated in public, political and academic debates. We focus on gender, class and race/migration, but are also open to other aspects (age, sexuality, disability, etc.) and their intersectional entanglements. Three fields of practice are examined as examples: (a) home care for older people by informal and semi-formal actors such as migrant live-in helpers; (b) inpatient care in the field of mental health; (c) approaches to technically assisted care using care robotics and telemedicine.

To explore care practice, we use social science methods such as qualitative interviews to examine the views, experiences and needs of carers and care recipients with regard to dealing with diversity in rural healthcare. In ethical analyses of group discussions, we also look at the underlying normative understandings and evaluations of diversity on the part of those involved. In addition, from a discourse-analytical perspective, we examine the pre-understandings, concepts and theories produced and discussed in media, political and academic debates and, building on cultural-scientific and power-critical approaches, analyse corresponding representations in various types of texts (research literature, policy papers, memoirs and cultural representations) in the field of tension between regional and global health.