Medicine & Healthcare

The research series discusses perspectives and challenges of the political in contemporary societies. It presents contributions from the various fields of Political Theory, Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Sociology and Cultural Sciences. Without being determined to a certain school of thought, the volumes explore the different paths of anti-essentialist, pluralist and radical democratic attempts of thinking the political which had been established in theoretical debates since the early 1980ies mainly in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The range of topics comprises deconstructive, genealogical and agonistic approaches, discourse and hegemony theories as well as Gouvernementality, Gender and Postcolonial Studies. The research series initiates a constructive dispute on the discourses on the political and is at the same time open for future trends and further developments of these debates.

The series of publications entitled “Freiburger Schriften zur Finanzwissenschaft und Wirtschaftspolitik” (“Freiburg Publications on Finance and Economic Policy”) publishes papers from the pre-eminent fields of economics research, which are also rich in tradition, at the University of Freiburg. The array of subjects which these analyses address ranges from the pension system and employment policy, education policy, demography, European and international governance, fiscal sustainability, federalism, healthcare policy, real estate economics, migration, tax and performance-based competition, the causes and effects of transnational conflicts, violence, crime, terror and corruption to behavioural economics and satisfaction research. These studies approach problems from both a theoretical perspective as well as using a selection of econometric, experimental or qualitative research methods. What links them is that they all address both political and social as well as topical academic issues. Their authors’ common, overarching goal is to provide well-founded recommendations on using their findings in politico-economic consulting and to help implement them.

Health communication is a field of research which deals with the social conditions, consequences and significance of communication that is related and relevant to health, both intentional and unintentional, interpersonal, media-related and public. The field of health communication, which emerged in Britain and the US several decades ago, has established itself in German-speaking countries in recent years and yielded a vast number of studies on the interplay between health, illness and communication. The series contains up-to-date studies in German or English which are devoted to this subject area and which consider communication and health from a communication studies perspective.

Our healthcare system is being confronted with fundamental moral and political challenges which affect its basic focus and character, such as persistent and controversial discussions on approaches to health and illness, matters of principle related to fairness and solidarity, medical utopias and dystopias, corruption and ethical questions, the debate about professional identity and commercialization, and the relationship between economics and medicine, to name but a few. This interdisciplinary series of publications encourages the reader to consider fundamental issues related to healthcare. It transcends not only basic medical ethics but also legal, political and economic issues.

The series of publications is a forum for up-to-date empirical and theoretical studies on issues relating to the sociology of health and other subjects connected to it. These studies examine topics such as health and health-related behaviour, the effects of those issues on other areas of life, the health system, the medical profession and the doctor-patient relationship among many others.