This analysis lays a framework for greater collaboration between the cancer community and social scientists in both research and policy. We argue that the growing cancer burden that low- and middle-income countries face is raising social, political, and economic challenges of global cancer that require interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional biomedical-clinical nexus. First, we briefly review some of the most important existing social science studies that have addressed cancer in low- and middle-income countries, including the main methods, approaches, and findings of this research. Second, we give an overview of recent interdisciplinary collaborations between social scientists and oncologists and demonstrate how qualitative research can help us to understand the distinct challenges of cancer care in low- and middle-income settings. Finally, we identify key areas for future collaboration and suggest possible paths forward for cancer research and policy that involve social science.
Researchers have long been concerned with cancer in what has been called the tropics, developing world, and low-and middle-income countries. Global health advocates' recent calls to attend to an emergent cancer epidemic in these regions were only the latest effort in this long history. Researchers, known as geographical pathologists, sought to determine the etiologies of cancer and other non-infectious diseases between the 1920s and the 1960s by comparing their occurrence across different environments. The geographical pathologists used the concept of the environment to analyze the influences that natural and artificial surroundings had on health. While the international network of geographical pathology fostered medical thinking about environmental health in the early and mid-twentieth century, the very meaning of environment, alongside the scientific methods for studying the environment, changed in this period. In the 1960s, epidemiology, previously used for the study of infectious diseases, displaced geographical pathology as the cohesive framework of cancer research. This signaled a shift in research focus, from one dedicated to diagnostics and the environment to one centered on population and statistical studies. This article shows that it was not the lack of knowledge about cancer in the developing world but rather specific configurations of knowledge that shaped which cancer interventions in the developing world researchers and public health officials conceived. I confirm that the manuscript is comprised of original material that is not under review elsewhere, and that the studies on which the research is based has been subject to review by the Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
in their widely-read account of Material powers (2010, 21), with The matter of mimesis we seek 'to extend thinking beyond the familiar division between what is and is not "material"' . Ongoing debates in anthropology and the sociology of knowledge over 'assemblages' , 'actants' and 'quasi-objects' (hybrids of the social and the natural) are currently reshaping scholarly models of materiality in ways that challenge claims about material determinism. The implications of these discussions for other disciplines are still unfolding. Our volume has approached materiality from the vantage point of the replicated object, a fruitful and provocative instance that allows us to construct the complex relations between social and political agency, meaning, making and use for a variety of different cultures and circumstances. At the same time, we as scholars feel a need to be reflexively attentive to our own position, given the major transformations in techniques, media and technologies of replication such as 3D printing, cloning, and digital humanities that are in the process of reshaping not only our labour as scholars, but even its object; not only our source materials, but even our understanding of what counts as a source; not only our daily lives, but even our sense of self. Such was historically the case with new media. Benjamin's The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1936), for example, famously grapples with the way that theories of artistic creativity based on appeals to subjectivity, genius and autonomy were challenged by the mechanical reproduction of works of art. Benjamin saw the value of a work of art as both reduced by reproduction and rendered subject to political interventions which altered its original meaning. Today, we face similar challenges, albeit posed by very different media, which present viewers with increasing difficulties in differentiating between reality and its many representations, as the essays of both Conte and Kromholz in this volume vividly illustrate. It is not infidelity in the act of representation that concerns us (as it did early moderns); rather, it is the ever-growing accuracy that new technologies afford that is problematic, for it seems to obliterate even the possibility of authenticity, originality and especially uniqueness. In
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