Agency – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Alex Broom and Katherine Kenny

This book provides a contemporary and comprehensive examination of cancer in everyday life, drawing on qualitative research with people living with cancer, their family members and health professionals. It explores the evolving and enduring affects of cancer for individuals, families and communities, with attention to the changing dynamics of survivorship, including social relations around waiting, uncertainty, hope, willfulness, obligation, responsibility and healing. Challenging simplistic deployments of survivorship and drawing on contemporary and classical social theory, it critically examines survivorship through innovative qualitative methodologies including interviews, focus groups, participant produced photos and solicited diaries. In assembling this panoramic view of cancer in the twenty-first century, it also enlivens core debates in sociology, including questions around individual agency, subjectivity, temporality, normativity, resistance, affect and embodiment. A thoughtful account of cancer embedded in the undulations of the everyday, narrated by its subjects and those who informally and formally care for them, Survivorship: A Sociology of Cancer in Everyday Life outlines new ways of thinking about survivorship for sociologists, health and medical researchers and those working in cancer care settings.

Read the book here.

By Trang Thu Do

In her thesis, Trang Do examines how breast cancer is understood and managed in Vietnam based on nine-month ethnography using observation, interviews with 37 patients, interviews with 11 healthcare providers, and three focus groups. She demonstrates that people widely perceive breast cancer as a modern disease which vitally requires biomedical interventions to detect and manage its malignancy. She argues that pursuing breast cancer treatment is not merely an event of biological nature but has become a “long-term career” for the sufferers of this illness. Her research highlights the structural vulnerability and health access problems, but also the nuances of women’s agency in their responses to this pathological condition.

Read the full thesis here.

Tag: Agency

Facing Malignancy: Women’s Lived Realities of Breast Cancer in Central Vietnam