Making future histories: risk, prevention and potential of cancer genetics in Southern Brazil.

Coming up next week at the DAHSM, as part of the 'Women's Health and Empowerment Series', Sahra Gibbon, PhD, Wellcome Trust Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of London, will give a seminar titled 'Making future histories: risk, prevention and potential of cancer genetics in Southern Brazil'. Sahra Gibbons's research for the past ten years has focused on examining the social and cultural dimensions of developments in the field of medicine described as ‘breast cancer genetics’. Her doctoral research was based in the UK looking at the interface between gendered cultures of breast cancer activism and the translation of knowledge and technologies associated with two inherited susceptibility genes discovered in the 1990s - BRCA 1 and BRCA2. The results of this study, which involved ethnographic research in clinical and non clinical arenas with patients, health professionals and publics, was subsequently published in 2007 by Palgrave Macmillan in the monograph entitled 'Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledge'. The presentation at DAHSM will provide a window on how cancer genetics is being constituted as part of a global field of transnational research and local health care, drawing on Sahra's ethnographic research in cancer genetic clinics in urban centres within Southern Brazil. Sahra will also explore how specific temporal orientations inform these developments and how ‘risk as potential’ and the ‘potential for risk’ comes to dynamically inform the pursuit of prevention, care, and knowledge as part of a collective yet diversely constituted pursuit of preventative health and the making of future histories. The seminar will take place from 400 to 530 pm in room 474 at Laurel Heights campus. Notice the slight change of time.