front cover of Africanizing Oncology
Africanizing Oncology
Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda
Marissa Mika
Ohio University Press, 2021
An innovative contemporary history that blends insights from a variety of disciplines to highlight how a storied African cancer institute has shaped lives and identities in postcolonial Uganda. Over the past decade, an increasingly visible crisis of cancer in Uganda has made local and international headlines. Based on transcontinental research and public engagement with the Uganda Cancer Institute that began in 2010, Africanizing Oncology frames the cancer hospital as a microcosm of the Ugandan state, as a space where one can trace the lived experiences of Ugandans in the twentieth century. Ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, patient records, oral histories, private papers from US oncologists, American National Cancer Institute records, British colonial office reports, and even the architecture of the institute itself show how Ugandans understood and continue to shape ideas about national identity, political violence, epidemics, and economic life. Africanizing Oncology describes the political, social, technological, and biomedical dimensions of how Ugandans created, sustained, and transformed this institute over the past half century. With insights from science and technology studies and contemporary African history, Marissa Mika’s work joins a new wave of contemporary histories of the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of Africans after independence. It contributes to a growing body of work on chronic disease and situates the contemporary urgency of the mounting cancer crisis on the continent in a longer history of global cancer research and care. With its creative integration of African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Africanizing Oncology speaks to multiple scholarly communities.
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front cover of Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa
Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa
Social and Historical Perspectives
Edited by Megan Vaughan, Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo, and Marissa Mika
University College London, 2020
New perspectives on the changing epidemiology of sub-Saharan Africa.

Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa offers new and critical perspectives on the causes and consequences of recent epidemiological changes in sub-Saharan Africa, with a special focus on the increasing incidence of “non-communicable” and chronic conditions. In this book, historians, social anthropologists, public health experts, and social epidemiologists present important insights into epidemiological change in Africa beyond theories of “transition.” The volume covers a broad thematic range, including the trajectory of maternal mortality in East Africa, the smoking epidemic, the history of sugar consumption in South Africa, the causality between infectious and non-communicable diseases in Ghana and Belize, the complex relationships between adult hypertension and pediatric HIV in Botswana, and stories of cancer patients and their families in Kenya. In all, the volume provides insights drawn from historical perspectives and from the African social and clinical experience that are of value to students and researchers in global health, medical anthropology, public health, and African studies.
 
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