In just over a century, cancer has become one of the leading causes of death in aging western societies. People are going to great lengths, particularly in the field of biomedicine, to fight this plague.
Yet is cancer really just an individual biological event? Are we all socially exposed to the same risk of getting it? What is the impact of treatments on patients’ lives and experiences? How have social representations of cancer evolved? What are the current community concerns about prevention?
These questions all highlight why cancer is a fully-fledged social phenomenon.
Benjamin Derbez is a doctor in social sciences and philosophy. He is a research fellow at Iris (Inserm). His empirical work addresses ethical questions in contemporary biomedicine from a critical point of view.
Zoé Rollin is a professor of social sciences at University Paris 13 (IUT, Social Careers Department), and researcher at the Iris laboratory and vice president of ORSEC (a monitoring centre for children with cancer going back to school). Her work focuses mostly on dealing with cancer while in school.