2 October 2024: Professor Michael Handford

Wednesday 2 October 2024 (Week 1 of term) 1.00 – 2.00pm, Room 2.03, John Percival Building

Cancer, Discourse and Intercultural Communication

Professor Michael Handford (Cardiff University)

A cancer diagnosis often induces a radical shift in one’s sense of self and relationships,
accompanied by a descent into what Frank (2013) describes as “chaos.” This talk argues that while communication and intercultural studies cannot cure cancer, they offer potentially transformative tools for navigating this chaotic “kingdom of the sick” (Sontag, 1978).

Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflections of my stage-4 cancer diagnosis in 2011
(Handford, forthcoming), I explore how concepts and tools such as Discourse (Gee,
2008), framing, and creative metaphors can help cancer patients move from chaos to
increased meaningfulness and agency. For instance, reframing one’s identity as a
“person-with-cancer” – a new secondary Discourse – can facilitate the transition to
becoming an expert patient.

I propose that cancer transforms all communicative relationships – intercultural,
interpersonal, and intrapersonal – into intercultural exchanges, as the illness renders
the self an ‘other’ to both oneself (Svenaeus, 2011) and others. By applying intercultural
communication strategies, such as tolerance for ambiguity, patients can better navigate these shifted relationships.

This approach, however, risks reinforcing what Jain and Stacey (2015) terms “pernicious
individualism” in healthcare discourse. I will reflect on this limitation by discussing how
these communication tools can also enhance collective understanding and support
systems for cancer patients. Patients resisting treatment recommendations as a type of
limited agency (Koenig, 2012) will also be discussed.

By bridging personal experience with communication theory, this talk aims to offer both
theoretical insights and practical strategies for those traversing the complex terrain of
serious illness.

References

• Frank, Arthur (2013) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
• Gee, James Paul (2015) Social Linguistics and Literacies. London: Routledge.
• Handford, Michael (forthcoming) Lump in my Throat: Communicating with Cancer. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
• Jain, Lochlain & Stacey, Jackie (2015) On writing about illness: A dialogue with Jain and Stacey on
cancer, STS, and cultural studies. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 1(1), 1-29.
• Koenig, Christopher (2011) Patient resistance as agency in treatment decisions. Soc. Sci. Med.
72, 1105–1114.
• Sontag, Susan (1978) Illness as Metaphor. New York: Vintage Books.
• Svenaeus, Fredrik (2011) Illness as unhomelike being-in-the-world: Heidegger and the
phenomenology of medicine. Medical Health Care and Philosophy, 14, 333–343.