Political Stakes of Cancer Series – Episode 6: Notes on Stigma: Reflections from India’s largest Cancer Hospital during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Podcast with Caro Caduff, Professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London, in conversation with Shagufta Bhangu, Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London.

While conducting research on the National Cancer Grid in India, Carlo Caduff, medical anthropologist and STS scholar, discusses how in South Asian cancer care, it is not temporalities and chronicity at the heart but rather logics of spatiality and mobility at work. These logics came into sharp contrast during the Covid-19 pandemic when Carlo found himself under the Indian “lock-downs.” Facing a difficult epistemic coincidence, Carlo, who has extensively researched pandemics and pandemic preparedness was now in India’s largest cancer hospital during a pandemic. He describes how the pandemic impacted all those in Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai and how its staff and medical workers began to face harassment and stigmatization for working in health care settings. Through him, we discover the forms cancer care provision and access took during the pandemic. He develops these closely grounded observations to reflect on the concept of ‘stigma’ and discusses its limits.

This podcast is part of a series edited by Thandeka Cochrane, Fabien Provost, and Shagufta Bhangu, and produced by Rory O’Connor, https://linktr.ee/roryoconnor_music.