This pilot project investigates the contagious awareness of cancer by comparing diachronic frames of cancer as they unfold under different ecological conditions. The project is organised around a set of questions that bear on our understanding of communicability: In the absence of a specific pathogen, what accounts for the transmission of cancer? What is actually transmitted in the “cancer epidemic”? The project moves away from clean disciplinary boundaries by taking cancer statistics as a case in point of scientific imagination – regarding stats as potential contagious agents that, under certain condition, can change people and nations. The study will be based on approximately nine months of multisided fieldwork in different settings in Denmark and Sweden.
The study is carried out as a postdoc study by PhD, anthropologist and epidemiologist Marie Louise Tørring (MLT). Apart from her affiliation with the AUFF Pilot Center for Cultural Epidemics, MLT holds a split position as Associate Professor between the interdisciplinary Danish Research Center for Cancer Diagnosis in Primary Care (CaP), Research Unit for General Practice, Faculty of Health; and the Department of Culture and Society – Anthropology and Ethnography at Aarhus University.
