The Representation and Care of Illness. Visual Culture, Trauma, and Medical Humanities

For a long time, scholars in the Humanities have been trying to move towards a boundary space that touches upon the medical and scientific disciplines. More than others, the topic of representation/visualisation, the relationship between ways of seeing, images, and the techniques to create them has emerged as a fertile and valuable ground for dialogue. This special issue of Cinema & Cie sets itself the ambitious goal of opening an interdisciplinary discussion reflecting on the images of illness, wound, pain, scar, and cure, which are shared today more than ever and go beyond the narrow medical field. In order to develop a new interdisciplinary methodology suitable for capturing the emotions, material dimensions, bodily practices, performative dynamics, and intersubjective systems that, as a whole, consolidate the mise en discourse of the body as an object of care, we have called upon the traditions of Trauma Studies, Medical Humanities and Visual Culture of science and medicine. In this perspective, images are not only the starting point for understanding knowledge production processes but also a valuable restorative tool for care and therapeutic practices.