Dwaipayan Banerjee – Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi

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Event Description

In Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi, Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi’s urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as patients and families negotiate an overextended health system unequipped to respond to the disease. Owing to long wait times, most urban poor cancer patients do not receive a diagnosis until it is too late to treat the disease effectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city’s largest cancer care NGO and at India’s premier public health hospital, Banerjee describes how, for these patients, a cancer diagnosis is often the latest and most serious in a long series of infrastructural failures. In the wake of these failures, Banerjee tracks how the disease then distributes itself across networks of social relations, testing these networks for strength and vulnerability. Banerjee demonstrates how living with and alongside cancer is to be newly awakened to the fragility of social ties, some already made brittle by past histories, and others that are retested for their capacity to support.

Event Speakers

• Dwaipayan Banerjee, Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Discussant: Durba Mitra, Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at Harvard University
• Discussant: Uponita Mukherjee, PhD Candidate in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department at Columbia University

Event Information

Free and open to the public. RSVP required via Eventbrite. Registered attendees will receive an event link on the day of the event.

Hosted by the Global Histories of Science Research Cluster at the Center for Science and Society.