social theory – Decolonising Global Health Archive

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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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.

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