Autobiographical narratives about contested conditions have been published in Western media, which often highlight personal experiences of dismissal in health care and public. Scholarship in medical humanities argues that illness narratives can give voice to affected communities and provide evidence of the experience of illness and disability. This approach emphasizes the performative power of personal storytelling and the need to witness, but risks to promote a reading of autobiography as a social good rather than as a complex, mediated and cultural practice. Specifically, what is insufficiently accounted for, is the role of mediality and materiality in autobiographical practices and politics of chronic illness. My project is a nuanced study of autobiographies of two chronic conditions: Long covid, the continuous illness after an infection with covid-19, and the chronic condition of myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) are contested and debated in polarized ways in contemporary biomedicine and culture, leading to stigmatization and reduced quality of care for those affected. I closely examine a selected number of emerging autobiographical forms such as collective storytelling, virtual exhibition, and artistic microblogs which have been published in Germany and in the US (2015–2023). By analyzing new strategies of communicating illness experience I ask how these media forms and material practices affect and are affected by politics of chronic illness and disability. I will integrate a wide variety of methodological approaches from media studies and concepts from disability studies and medical humanities to claim that closely examining mediated and material practices of autobiography opens overlooked relations between illness, media and politics that are obscured by the focus on representation. The project aims to reframe autobiography within questions of stigmatization and inequality and to reconsider how autobiography is conceptualized and approached in medical humanities more generally. Combined with innovative approaches of public engagement, the project seeks to impact the cultural bias against unexplained illness and to expand my transdisciplinary research expertise at the intersection of cultural studies and medicine.

"The project ""Internationalization and further development of doctoral studies"" was carried out by the three universities UCM Trnava (SK), UJEP Ústí nad Labem (CZ) and Uniwersytet Wrocławski (PL). The starting point was the finding that there were clear deficits in the training of doctoral students. This included the very low level of international orientation and networking. In view of today's requirements in science and practice, this is extremely problematic. The project and the strategic partnership formed in this way contributed to promoting the internationalization of the doctoral study programs at the cooperating institutions, through joint events, through the networking of the doctoral programs at the participating universities and through the long-term prospect of international acquisition of PhD students.Another deficit could be identified in the methodological training of the doctoral students. Numerous measures were implemented as part of the project to strengthen the methodological skills of the doctoral students. This includes the organization of joint international doctoral colloquia, which will be continued in the future, the creation of a joint curriculum and the creation of methodologically and scientifically high-quality teaching material, the creation of a publication option specifically for doctoral students, the strengthening of international exchange at the level of the doctoral students and the Communication of current, also non-university research results and innovative methods. Another focus of the project was on the further qualification of supervisors and teachers in the doctoral program. For this purpose, methodological recommendations for this target group were developed and published in order to increase the quality of the supervision of the doctoral students."