Cinzia Greco - Böcker

Assemblages of cancer illustrates the tensions in the experiences and context of breast cancer in Western Europe. Breast cancer is presented as a success story in oncology, especially in countries with advanced, universal healthcare systems. At the same time, individual experiences are shaped by uncertainty, local variability of healthcare provisions, and the need for patients to assemble information about the treatments, knowledge on healthcare systems navigation, and different processes of meaning-making to manage the uncertainty and variability characterising individual outcomes. The book explores both how individual bodies and experiences are transformed by different local medical practices, institutions and discourses of breast cancer and how patients need to find their own way in these contexts. Assemblages of cancer is based on ten years of ethnographic work with patients and medical professionals in the UK, France and Italy.

Politics and Practices of the Ethnographies of Biomedicine and STEM: Among White Coats collects critical examinations of the politics, positionality, and epistemological and methodological issues of doing ethnography in a number of locales across the globe and in fields including computer science, astronomy, mining, biology, and medicine.The book captures a wide breadth of ethnographic case studies conducted by scholars at different stages of their careers, with various geographical backgrounds, and working across different settings and regions of the world, demonstrating the unfolding of overlapping concerns in unique ways. ‘Among White Coats’ is the first systematic and critical examination of the politics and epistemology of doing ethnography in biomedicine and STEM, adding to the extensive production of studies based on the ethnography of medicine and ethnography of science, as well as the ongoing debate on the foundation of ethnography. The book is geared toward academics and research students from different disciplinary backgrounds. It is a resource useful not only for students and Ph.D. candidates but also for expert ethnographers, presenting the most recent debates on ethnography and knowledge production in the STEM and biomedical fields. The book is partly a response to the growing awareness of the increasingly pertinent objective for ethnographers to reflect on their positionalities in their writing. Thus, this book offers a reflexive guide to thinking through the political and practical aspects of ethnographic practice.