Uncertain Futures: Communication and Culture in Childhood Cancer Treatment (Wiley Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture)

This book examines children and young people’s attempts to participate in conversations about their own treatment throughout uncertain cancer trajectories, including the events leading up to diagnosis, treatment, remission, relapse, and cure or death.

• Clearly and compellingly written, Clemente relies on a new multi-layered method to identify six cancer communication strategies
• Illustrates that communication is central to how children, parents, and healthcare professionals constitute, influence, and make sense of the social worlds they inhabit―or that they want to inhabit
• Provides ethnographic case studies of childhood cancer patients in Spain, using children's own words
• Examines the challenges of how to talk to and how to encourage patients' involvement in reatment discussions
• In his critique of the “telling” versus “not telling” debates, Clemente argues that communication should be adjusted to the children’s own needs, and that children's own questions can indicate how much or little they want to be involved

Uncertain Futures is the winner of the 15th Annual Modest Reixach Prize.

Ignasi Clemente is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College, CUNY, USA. His research interests include sociocultural and communicative aspects of pain and suffering, childhood studies, and embodied communication. His research on chronically ill children has been published in journals including Social Science and Medicine, Sociology of Health and Illness, and Communication and Medicine. Among others, he has contributed to the Oxford Textbook of Paediatric Pain (2013), the Handbook of Conversation Analysis (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Healthcare Settings: Policy, Participation and New Technologies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and the Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism (Blackwell, 2008).