An account of the historical and contemporary world of liver cancer in Senegal – Somatosphere

Noemi Tousignant, Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London, in conversation with Shagufta Bhangu, Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London.

In this episode, we hear from Noemi Tousignant about the history of knowledge production, vaccine trials and economic infrastructures which help us understand the realities of liver cancer in contemporary Senegal. By leaning on methods from two disciplines, anthropology and history, Noemi weaves together the complex politics of space, epistemics and race in a country where everyone knows someone affected by liver cancer. She explains how the specifics of this form of cancer, as an acute form trouble assumptions about cancer as a chronic disease and as tied within early detection, early treatment. Instead, she describes how liver cancers stem from chronic Hepatitis B infections. The irony, as Noemi explains, is the failure to provide vaccines for Hepatitis B in the very region (West Africa) where one of its major medical trials was run. Together, these factors, she tells us, reveal a form of ‘unprotection’ which is historically produced and the brunt of which is being borne by Senegalese lives.

This podcast is part of a series edited by Thandeka Cochrane, Fabien Provost, and Shagufta Bhangu, and produced by Rory O’Connor, https://linktr.ee/roryoconnor_music.