Team:
Ignacia Arteaga with Maryon Macdonald, and Kelly Fagan Robinson
The CRUK pump-priming grant ‘Elusive Risks’, explored the social worlds of ‘structurally vulnerable’ communities in Cambridgeshire and how their experiences of care and risk inform their strategies to prevent disease and live well.
Instead of asking about well-rehearsed barriers people face to attend healthcare services, and cancer prevention, for example, we wanted to ask a different question. We drew on the avenues that anthropology offers:
To consider the lived experiences of a diverse set of social groups to try to understand how they perceive cancer and other health risks in their lives.
Unsurprisingly, for many of those groups, cancer is not a priority. It is one of the issues that can happen to you in a cascade of disasters, and so when you ask about cancer, you hear instead issues around health, poverty and stigma. Those issues are entangled, even when we try to separate them, experientially and disciplinarily.
The Elusive Risks Roundtable was borne out from the need to bring the different worlds of academic disciplines, healthcare specialisms, and various publics together. By doing that, we sought to tackle the elusiveness that has characterised our approaches to deal with these issues and join forces.
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