In October this year, the Cartographies of Cancer Team, in conjunction with the Grid Oncology project, launched a 12 episode podcast series on the Somatosphere website.
In this series, which continues the work of the Political Stakes of Cancer Network, we bring together interviews with early career researchers and experts investigating cancer in various social, political and geographical formations whose work is contributing towards building the contemporary landscape of cancer research. Over a series of 12 episodes, we deep dive into the work of anthropologists, sociologists and historians working across a vast array of contexts on varying aspects of cancer – from Mali, to Brazil, to China. We speak to these researchers about their experiences of doing cancer research – what drove them to choose their topics, what their fieldwork experiences were like, what they found through their research and the stakes they see embedded in studies of cancer in their research settings.
By bringing together scholars researching and writing about cancer from multiple disciplinary and geographical vantage points, we hope to demonstrate the particular and global stakes, forms and milieus within which cancer appears, lives and operates. We also hope, with this series, to offer some insight into the stakes and experiences of research itself – what it is like to be a researcher and to do fieldwork – particularly when this fieldwork tackles an emotionally challenging topic like cancer. Each episode sheds light on doing archival and ethnographic work, as well as elucidates for us the subjectivity of the researcher. Second, as cancer gains traction as a site of research in the social studies of science and medicine, the series brings together a range of introspective and engaged conversations with scholars working in this personally challenging and morally complex research field.
The series has been produced by convenors of the Political Stakes of Cancer network, Thandeka Cochrane, Fabien Provost and Shagufta Bhangu, with Rory O’Connor (https://linktr.ee/roryoconnor_music) as sound editor. It has been supported by various funding bodies at King’s College London including the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy’s Research Fund, the department of Global Health and Social Medicine’s Impact Fund and the Culture, Medicine and Power Research Group.
