Tag: global

What is Anti-Colonial Global Social Theory?

By Sujata Patel

Anti-colonial social theory is a set of ideas, assessments and practices of metatheoretical nature that have originated within anti-colonial thought. As a methodology, it theorizes and interrogates the ideological within the empirical, the theoretical, and the ‘scientific unconscious’ of fields/disciplines. While criticising late 19th Euro-American theories as universal set of propositions, it locates its limitations and presents ways to unravel the ideological-political elements that structure thought and scholarship. It also presents ways through which new global theories may be conceptualised and researched. The paper engages, analyses, compares and assesses various methodological interventions made by anti-colonial social theorists regarding colonialism, its origin and its continuities; its pasts and presents in distinct times and epochs and in its varied spatial geographies and suggests that these can become tools to define global social theory.

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Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India

By Cecilia Coale Van Hollen

As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen’s critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women’s narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.

Read the book here.

Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda

By Marissa Mika

Over the past decade, an increasingly visible crisis of cancer in Uganda has made local and international headlines. Based on transcontinental research and public engagement with the Uganda Cancer Institute that began in 2010, Africanizing Oncology frames the cancer hospital as a microcosm of the Ugandan state, as a space where one can trace the lived experiences of Ugandans in the twentieth century. Ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, patient records, oral histories, private papers from US oncologists, American National Cancer Institute records, British colonial office reports, and even the architecture of the institute itself show how Ugandans understood and continue to shape ideas about national identity, political violence, epidemics, and economic life.

Africanizing Oncology describes the political, social, technological, and biomedical dimensions of how Ugandans created, sustained, and transformed this institute over the past half century. With insights from science and technology studies and contemporary African history, Marissa Mika’s work joins a new wave of contemporary histories of the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of Africans after independence. It contributes to a growing body of work on chronic disease and situates the contemporary urgency of the mounting cancer crisis on the continent in a longer history of global cancer research and care. With its creative integration of African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Africanizing Oncology speaks to multiple scholarly communities.

Read the book here.

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