Cancer Entangled: A New Perspective on Cancer Control

By Rikke Sand Andersen, Marie Louise Trring, Stine Hauberg Nielsen, Michal Frumer, Sara Marie Hebsgaard Offersen, Camilla Hoffmann Merrild, Rikke Aarhus, Benedikte Mller Kristensen

Cancer Entangled delves into the shifts that took place in Denmark around the turn of the century, as health promoters sought to minimize delays in cancer diagnoses in the hope of improving cancer survival rates. The authors propose a temporal reframing of cancer control, emphasizing the importance of focusing on how people – potential patients as well as healthcare professionals – experience and anticipate cancer before a diagnosis or prediction has been made.

This compelling argument challenges and augments anthropological work on cancer control, which has historically privileged attention to the productive role of science and technology and to life with cancer or cancer risk. By offering rich ethnographic insights into the introduction of the first cancer vaccine, cancer signs and symptoms, public discourses on delays, social class and care seeking, cancer suspicion in the clinic, as well as the work on fast-track referral, the book convincingly situates cancer control in an ethical register involving attention to acceleration and time, showing how cancer waiting times become an index of the “state of the nation”.

Product Details

Publisher: Rutgers University Press (April 14, 2023)

Language: English

Hardcover: 192 pages

ISBN-10: 1978826850

ISBN-13: 978-1978826854

Reading Age: 18 years and up