On Wednesday 4th June David Reubi, Thandeka Cochrane and Jennifer Fraser delivered a presentation at King’s College London’s Global Health and Social Medicine’s Department Seminar series on “Cartographies of Cancer: Measuring and Mapping Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Here, Reubi, Cochrane and Fraser provided an overview of their Wellcome Trust funded project through offering a longue-durée analysis of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s African cancer maps. Drawing on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this talk highlighted the interwoven colonial entanglements, shifting imaginaries of Africa, materialities and modes of surveillance, and subjectivities and socialities that make up these maps. In doing so, Reubi, Cochrane and Fraser troubled the scientific objectivity of cancer maps, revealing these images as fraught and fragile objects that rest upon fragmentary data, invisible forms of labour, and uncomfortable imperial histories that live on in current tensions and inequalities.
