Cartographies of Cancer: Measuring and Mapping Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa

International initiatives to map health and disease in Africa have multiplied in recent years. The epidemiological maps produced through these initiatives are critical to the evidentiary and accountability regimes that dominate contemporary global health, bringing to light neglected issues and determining which interventions work. This project aims to shed light on these maps that have become so critical but about which we know so little. In collaboration with epidemiologists and drawing on insights from science and technology studies, the project examines the socio-technical infrastructures and political rationales that underpin these maps as well as the understandings of disease and Africa that these maps bring into being. Specifically, it explores these issues through an archival and ethnographic analysis of an influential cartographic effort with a troublesome colonial past: the cancer maps of Africa produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and its network of cancer registries across the continent.