skip to content

Early Cancer Institute

 
Futures in question image

This session explores the role that anticipations of the future play in the field of cancer research and medicine. It will feature Rebecca Fitzgerald in conversation with Stephen John, a philosopher, and Ayo Wahlberg, an anthropologist, who both also study cancer early detection, in an effort to encourage cross-disciplinary discussion of key issues in the field.

As part of an attempted ‘paradigm shift’ towards the prevention and early detection of cancer, clinical care has increasingly involved the management of cancer risk as well as the treatment of disease. In other words, biomedical practitioners aspire to quantify and intervene on imagined possible futures using notions of ‘risk’. Risk now dominates biomedical ideas about cancer and is central to its prevention, detection, and treatment, as well as to ideas about recurrence and life afterward cancer. For decades, social scientists have explored the unspoken assumptions and unseen consequences of this paradigm shift to ‘risky medicine’. For example, they have considered the complicated daily realities of life for communities under (self-)surveillance due to diagnoses of cancer risk, and questioned for whom these preventative interventions are accessible. Despite recent attempts to forge interdisciplinary collaboration, social scientists and biomedical practitioners rarely cite each other in work on the effects of  ‘risky thinking’ in the field of cancer. This session brings a range of disciplines into conversation to discuss these issues concerning ‘futures’ in cancer with a focus on what matters in practice.

It will take place 5-7pm on November 8th, both online and in person in Room S1, 1st floor, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road. More details are available here: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/35782/

People can register to receive the Zoom link for the session here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cancerous-futures-online-registration-only-tickets-431543256497

It is part of a wider research network called Futures in Question. The network explores how, why, and for whom we anticipate the future. The network offers a forum in which people with diverse disciplinary and professional backgrounds can come together to interrogate different modes of anticipation and ways of thinking about the future in the world today. Sessions will feature panels of critics, applied scholars, and practitioners who engage—albeit from different perspectives—with anticipatory practices across a range of fields. These fields include public health, artificial intelligence (AI), Afrofuturism and astrology among ot

Date: 
Tuesday, 8 November, 2022 - 17:00 to 19:00
Event location: 
Room S1, 1st floor, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge AND online