Sociocultural anthropology, anthropology of medicine, science, experts, crisis, risk, media, and the state; social theory, research methods, ethnography. United States, South Asia.

Carlo Caduff is a Professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, where he serves as Director of Research and Chair of the Culture, Medicine & Power (CMP) Research Group. He has been working for over a decade as a social and cultural anthropologist with a focus on the anthropology of science, medicine, media, technology, and the state. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009 and has been teaching at King’s since 2012.

Research

His work engages with anthropological, sociological and philosophical debates about power, language, the body and the state. Over the past decade, he has been the Principal Investigator of two major ethnographic research projects: one on pandemic preparedness in the United States and another one on cancer care in India. These projects have resulted in publications in journals in the social sciences (Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, Cambridge Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Anthropological Theory, BioSocieties), the medical sciences (The Lancet, The Lancet Oncology, Global Public Health, The Journal of Global Oncology, The Journal of Cancer Policy, Nature Reviews Cancer), and the humanities (Critical Inquiry). In addition to these articles, he is the author of a book on pandemic preparedness published by the University of California Press (with a German translation published by Konstanz University Press). He is the editor of three journal special issues, including a Current Anthropology issue on new media publics

His current work, located in the global South, examines how patients and family members access cancer care in India. Ethnographically the project follows actors and institutions struggling to make medicine affordable in an emerging economy grappling with entrenched forms of health inequality. The focus is on cancer, arguably one of the most complex and expensive medical conditions. The rising rates of the disease, the lack of universal health coverage, the fragmented health system, and the growing fascination with technology have transformed cancer into one of the greatest global health challenges of our time. For a large part of the Indian population, a diagnosis results in catastrophic expenditures for patients and their families. In this context, ‘affordability’ has emerged as a topic of great social and political urgency as well as medical, scientific, and logistic challenges. The project is based in India’s largest public cancer hospital and is funded by a 5-year Wellcome Trust Investigator Award.