Survivorship: A Sociology of Cancer in Everyday Life

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, wilfulness, 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.

Alex Broom is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Sydney, Australia. Katherine Kenny is Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Sydney, Australia.

Introduction 1. Bodily Becomings 2. Waiting, Hauntings and Surviving 3. Malignant Attitudes 4. Entangled and Estranged 5. Collective Emotions, Affective Relations 6. Enchantment, Acceleration and Innovation 7. Participation and the Making of Possibility Conclusion