On March 26, at 2:30 pm, in the ICS meeting room, there will be a session of the Permanent Seminar on Communication and Diversity dedicated to the theme “Discourses on cancer: analyzing personal experiences and coping strategies”. Susana de Noronha and Mohammad Rabbani are the guests.
Susana de Noronha will launch the debate on “Doing Science Between Text and Image: an illustrated methodology to access invisibilized cancers and organs”. This presentation proposal results from an anthropological analysis regarding the experience of a Portuguese woman through the diagnosis and treatment of endometrial adenocarcinoma. Her embodied knowledge and narrative will allow us to grasp a specific set of health issues endured by women with gynecological malignancies, understanding how perceptions of illness, treatment, corporeity, sexuality, womanhood, motherhood and resistance are intertwined. This illustrated analysis also intends to dismantle stereotypes entrenched in the ways we see and understand women, gynaecological malignancies and sexual organs, bringing into discussion a type of cancer that, although frequent, is absent from public discussion and collective imagery, being similarly disregarded by social science.
Susana de Noronha is an anthropologist, Ph.D. in sociology, and a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. Winner ex aequo of the 2007 CES Award for Young Portuguese-speaking Social Scientists and of the 2003 Bernardino Machado Award for the best student in Anthropology, by the University of Coimbra. As well as a writer and researcher, she is also a published lyricist and an author of scientific illustrations, using photography, painting and creative ethnographic drawing.
For his part, Mohammad Rabbani will discuss “Meaning-making coping methods among who are suffering from cancer”. For Mohammad Rabbani, people understand the meaning of their existence in the context of cultural teachings and social constructions and continue their lives. But often when major crises threaten their existence and annihilate them and cause them great suffering, they are again faced with the fundamental questions of life and existence. In such a situation, the person either completely faces the lack of the meaning or is in a state of helpless to deal with the crisis, or having to reconsider all about that is available from cultural beliefs or religious teachings. This is the process of redefining, re-articulation and reproducing the meanings.
Mohammad Rabbani is a Post-doctoral student and a member of the Communication and Society Research Centre at the University of Minho- Braga and also a member of the International project team on Culture & Coping at the University of Gävle- Sweden. He concluded his Ph.D. in Public Policy/Political Science at the University of Tehran in 2017, with the thesis “The role of Discourse as a Policy Tool in the Cultural Socialization (A comparative study: Iran and Sweden)”. He is presently specializing in issues related to sociology, public policy, social innovation, and cultural studies. Also, he has researched in the following fields: Coping with the crisis, Effects of Islamic theology on political power, Identifying and socialization, and Social control theory.
The session will be chaired by Rita Araújo.
Rita Araújo is a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and a researcher at the Communication and Society Research Centre. She is interested in Health Communication and Health Journalism, News Sources, and Health Literacy. She was a Visiting Scholar at the New York City Food Policy Centre, CUNY School of Public Health – Hunter College. Rita was a researcher within the European project Health Reporting Training Project, financed by the European Commission, and a Ph.D. research fellow within the project Disease in the News.
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