Uncertain Futures: Communication and Culture in Childhood Cancer Treatment

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, Clementerelieson a new multi-layered methodto 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.

Keywords: Ethnography of communication, Conversation Analysis, cancer in children and young people, communication regulation, cancer communication, longitudinal illness trajectory, cancer trajectories, cancer diagnosis, cultural variation in cancer communication, paediatric cancer, heterogeneous practices and preferences of cancer information disclosure, chemotherapy, non disclosure, partial disclosure, communicating about death, patient information needs, delivery of uncertain and bad news, patient participation, children’s involvement, parents dealing with cancer, Catalonia, Spain, Medical Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, Language and Culture, Face-to-Face Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Bedside Skills, Communication Skills in Medicine, Health Communication, Anthropology of Childhoods, Medicine and Narrative, osteosarcoma, childhood cancer, emotion, patient questions, crying, optimism, hope, local turn-by-turn management of communication, sociocultural dimensions of uncertainty, medical authority, silence, not talking, agency, responsibility, chronic illness, terminal illness, future, Communication Studies, Health & Social Care, Communication Studies, Health & Social Care