Elementos para la despolitización del cáncer de mama

Breast cancer has acquired unprecedented visibility in Spain. Although the origins of the breast cancer movement were concerned with the oppressive patient role and the increasing incidence of the disease, the last three decades have been marked by a focus on diagnosis through screening and awareness campaigns. Some would say that we need to celebrate this progressive politization of breast cancer that has placed the disease on the national agenda. However, I argue that its political purpose is in crisis and has depolitised the disease without raising any suspicions among the most critical sectors, including feminist circles. Building on my work on breast cancer from the past 14 years, in this article I take a cue from Mari Luz Esteban’s (2017) critique of the ‘overinvisibilization’ of breast cancer to demonstrate how it has been depoliticized. I will reinterrogate how breast cancer is spoken about, how women are represented, what topics make headlines and which ones are silenced or remain taboo. In particular,I will illustrate how the ‘overinvisibilization’ of breast cancer results in various forms of discourses and practices. These include the hypervisibility of hegemonic and monothematic messages that are compounded with sexism; and the invisibilization of those differential experiences and discourses about the disease that questions the status quo of the industry of cancer

Listening to women: political narratives of breast cancer in Spain

The thesis examines the complex relationship between individual experiences of breast cancer and the wider social, political and discursive context in which they are located. It focuses on how Spanish women living with breast cancer define their own health priorities by exploring their experiences and their dissatisfactions, which appear to have been excluded from public and biomedical discourses. The data was collected in a provincial city in Western Spain and focused on the lived experiences of 32 women living and surviving breast cancer. Interviews were mainly conducted in the headquarters of the Spanish Association against Cancer of that region, but also at women’s homes and in other public spaces. Based upon a framework of narratives of resistance, grounded in feminist theory, critical medical anthropology and sociology, an ethnographic approach allowed a focus on breast cancer patients and survivors as ‘experts’ of their own health, addressing fundamental concerns in the production of knowledge. The thesis discusses the relationship between breast cancer and social inequality. It examines the dramatic ways that structures of power such as class, age, gender, and disability, intersect and “conspire” through a web of social beliefs, practices, norms and expectations to shape, and exacerbate, women’s experiences of illness, in particular, of those women who need health care the most. The research also highlights the ways in which the experiential symptoms of breast cancer are portrayed and perceived in public and medical discourses in sexual terms or physiological terms, which ignores the wider social and embodied contexts of women’s experiences. By answering the call made by feminist writers such as Wilkinson (2001) and Broom (2000) to listening to the narratives of resistance of these Spanish women, this study therefore offers both a particular cultural account of their collaboration with a range of institutions such as health professionals, charities, the family and the social care system, but also valuable lay experiences which are more generally relevant to wider healthcare practice and policy

A Critical Air Quality Science Perspective on Citizen Science in Action

Air pollution is a hybrid phenomenon, understood and produced through social practices and material environmental processes. This hybridity leads us to engage critically with how air quality science is carried out. In dialogue with the critical physical geography subdiscipline, we propose a critical air quality science (CAQS) framework to study air pollution’s sociomateriality. We use CAQS to illuminate four tensions in the dynamics of knowledge production during a citizen science air quality monitoring project: making undone science matter, blurring “insiderness”/“outsiderness”, traffic as both life and death, and changing behaviours versus changing systems. Drawing on interviews with citizen scientists, we outline the implications of these tensions for air quality research design and reporting. The CAQS framework provokes critical thought about the consequences of how air quality science understands, creates and communicates knowledge, and how we can reconfigure our relations with the air to minimise air inequalities

Building Health Research Capacity: The Impact of a UK Collaborative Programme

Purpose: Strengthening research capacity (RC) amongst health professionals has both organisational and individual benefits. It can increase the quality of research and support the transfer of evidence into practice and policy. However there is little evidence on what works to develop and strengthen RC. This paper contributes to the evidence base by reporting findings from an evaluation of a programme that aimed to build capacity to use and do research amongst NHS and local authority organisations and their staff in a large english research partnership organisation. Methods: The evaluation used multiple qualitative methods including semi-structured interviews, focus groups and workshops (n=131 respondents including public advisers, university, NHS, and local government partners). Results: The RC building programme provided a range of development opportunities for NHS and local authority staff resulting in increased confidence and skills to undertake, participate in, and use research. Additionally, positive influences on organisational practice and collaborative working were reported. Conversely, challenges to developing research capacity were also identified as were the importance of resources, senior level buy-in, and the relevance of research topic to practice in facilitating participation in the programme. Conclusion: Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care North West Coast’s (CLAHRC-NWC) RC building programme differed from convential approaches giving less emphasis to formal teaching and more to experiental learning and focusing on both individual capacities and supporting organisations to integrate RC building into staff development programmes. The findings demonstrate that providing opportunities for staff in NHS and local authority organisations to develop research knowledge and skills alongside an infrastructure that supports and encourages their participation in research can have positive impacts on research capacity and organisational research culture. The potential for generalising this approach to other organisational contexts is discusse

At a glance: The CLAHRC NWC Health Inequalities Assessment Toolkit (2017):Coordinators: Popay, J. Porroche-Escudero, A., Sadler, G. and Simpson, S. Lancaster: The National Institute of Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care North West Coast

This card is an abridged version of the full toolkit for busy professionals so that they can quickly identify and understand the information they need. Visit the website here: www.hiat.org.u