Important Dates

Abstract

A novel landscape of healthcare and cancer treatment is emerging in Kenya at the intersection between an emerging cancer epidemic, expanding medical and health insurance markets, a middle class with access to credit, and the continued evisceration of public healthcare. Following middle-class cancer patients and their families as they navigate these landscapes, I explore the double binds of cancer treatment as a shifting geography of state-of-the-art medical technologies in private facilities opens up horizons of medical care just within or just beyond reach. Families find themselves vulnerable both to an extractive medical marketplace orientated to making profits and to the ‘ordinary crisis’ of state healthcare undermined by austerity and neglect. Exploring intersections between medical, health, and economic precarities as healthcare is privatized and people are pushed into debt while the state disinvests in public goods, I explore entanglements between biocapital, neoliberalism, chronic disease, and the middle class in Kenya.

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