Kampriani, Eirini; (2017) Bio-graphies of Uncertain Futures: Religion, Science and Breast Cancer Risk in Greece. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

This thesis explores the social and cultural context of breast cancer risk in Greece, with particular reference to the intersections between religious philanthropy and individualised medicine. Addressing the experiences of women with family history of the disease, it explores how scientific knowledge-practices that employ specific configurations of risk management and bring forth a demand for self-monitoring, are ‘coproduced’ with local cosmologies and social orders. The thesis draws on longterm ethnographic research in Halkidiki, Northern Greece, navigating between a prevention centre organised by an Orthodox Christian Convent, and local communities. A shorter part of fieldwork research in Athens to contextualise with broader developments in the capital. At the intersections of traditional Orthodox Christianity’s values of philanthropy and modern biomedical and genetic medicine projects of population screening, concepts of risk and heredity come in dialogue with notions of duty to and freedom of the body-self, fate and predestination, in various ways. These inform women’s perceptions of embodied risk as a domain of biosocial uncertainties, where knowledge and informed action are weighted against culturally-specific ways of living temporality. In effect, this thesis records the possibilities, paradoxes and constraints that emerge in situated contexts, as notions and practices associated with risk management and responsibility are conceptualised and acted upon in the face of uncertain futures.

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