On 16 July 2024, Thandeka Cochrane presented a paper, co-authored with David Reubi, on “Networks of (In)justice: Towards data justice in the surveillance of cancer in sub-Saharan Africa” on the panel “Transforming the Study of Cancer” at the 2024 quadrennial joint meeting of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology and the Society for Social Studies of Science in Amsterdam. The paper focused on the work of the African Cancer Registry Network, asking questions about the roles of networks in creating systems of greater epistemic (and material) justice for African cancer care.
The panel was hosted by The Political Stakes of Cancer Network, an international network for the social study of cancer co-founded by Thandeka Cochrane at King’s College London in 2022. The study of cancer has gathered an extensive community of scholars in the social sciences and humanities, providing a more dense, heterogeneous, and diverse approach to this disease multiple. Science and technology scholars have taken an important role in this task by examining how knowledge about cancer is produced and with what consequences for researchers, practitioners, and patients. The Transforming Cancer Panel asked questions about what tools are helpful in discerning what logics, interests, and imaginaries are at play in the cancer research and care arena, looking at questions such as the ever-increasing influence of pharmaceutical companies and investments in heavily technocratic forms of cancer care, the growing attention to cell biology research and the individualization of risk which makes cancer research shift further from identifying other aetiologies of cancer, such as environmental and ecological links. Panel papers ranged from discussing the meaning of the word cancer in different languages in Tanzania to the ways in which North American Stage Four breast cancer sufferers narrated their cancer journeys.
