On Friday 16 May 2025, Jennifer Fraser and David Reubi were invited to present a paper at the CircuStat Workshop on the Production and Circulation of International Forms of Quantitative Knowledge organised by the Centre Maurice Halbwachs at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (www.circustat.info). Entitled ‘The Making of a Global Cancer Map’, Jennifer and David’s paper explored some of the political, technical and human infrastructures that underpin what is probably today’s most influential map of the global cancer burden: the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s GLOBOCAN maps. They began by examining the Agency’s calculation of the burden of cancer worldwide in the early 1980s, stressing the new estimation techniques that were used but also the new imagined audiences for these cancer statistics and the new stories these statistics were telling about cancer in the world. They also argued how Europe acted as a laboratory for the development of the Agency’s GLOBOCAN maps in the 1990s. Specifically, they underlined how Europe offered a space to develop prototypes of the human and technical infrastructures that would later support the making of a global cancer map, from the European Network of Cancer Registries and its standardisation efforts to the development of the Agency’s CancerMondial website. Last but not least, Jennifer and David discussed how the GLOBOCAN maps rested on a global cancer surveillance apparatus which the Agency set up from the late 1980s onwards. Focusing on the Agency’s work in Africa, they showed how the Agency did so by reviving the old network of cancer registries that had been set up by colonial medical officers in the 1950s and 1960s as well as by finding and training African registrars that would run the registries and collect data of the necessary quality and standard.
