Course description
The international and interdisciplinary Gender Studies offers a broad range of concepts for theorizing the de/construction and social meaning of gender. Within Gender Studies, epistemologies of the body play a crucial role in research on individuals and collectives. Although Disability Studies and Medical Humanities developed through different trajectories, both fields converge around questions of gender, body, health, illness, embodiment, and care. Contributing to broader discussions of how individuals live and engage within gender relations, these neighboring fields approach the body from different angles to investigate how it has become a contested site in modern societies. In this course, we will focus on people whose bodies are subjected to treatment and attend to their stories.
Disability Studies has its origins in the disability rights movements that fought against paternalism, institutionalisation and discrimination. These movements challenged the negative framings of disability commonly found in medicine, psychology, special education, and rehabilitation, replicated in many artistic, literary, and cultural depictions of disability. In their place, Disability Studies proposed the social model of disability, focusing on barriers that limit people’s self-determination (cf. Thomas 2019). Offering a human rights-based approach to persons with disabilities, the study of diverse bodies includes personal narratives that enable drawing from a collective narrative of disability.
Medical Humanities is a broad interdisciplinary field within which particular strands provide conceptual and methodological tools for uncovering dimensions of illness experience that may remain less visible within biomedical models. Narrative medicine, a growing field within medical humanities, recognizes storytelling as central to healthcare and as a key resource for understanding patients’ health problems, concerns, and treatment trajectories (Kirmayer et al 2023, 235). In addition, illness narratives may function as important coping mechanisms, enabling individuals to make sense of bodily experiences (Brokerhof, Ybema and Bal 2020).
This course explores how narratives around disability and chronic illness can be emancipatory by challenging dominant medicalised norms and offering alternative, positive framings of difference and embodied experiences.
Course information
Time: 5-6-7 October 2026
Location: Innsbruck University on location
Deadline for applications: 5 June 2026
Applications should be sent to: InterGender Consortium Coordinator Edyta Just (edyta.just@liu.se)
Maximum number of participants: 20
Organised by:
- Local InterGender Course Organizer: Innsbruck University and Linköping University
- InterGender, International Consortium for Interdisciplinary Feminist Research Training
Course coordinators:
- Local InterGender Course Coordinator: Lisa Pfahl and Edyta Just
- InterGender Consortium Coordinator: Edyta Just
Teachers:
- Edyta Just, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden
- Dr. Lisa Pfahl, Professor for Disability Studies and Inclusive Education, Innsbruck University
- Michael, Rasell, Ph.D., University Lecturer, Department of Education, Innsbruck University
- Dr. Christoph Singer, Professor for British and Anglophone Cultural Studies, Innsbruck University