Clinical encounter and the logic of relationality: Reconfiguring bodies and subjectivities in clinical relations.

This article critically examines the significance of relational approaches for sociological understandings of clinical interactions, relations and practices, by exploring the ways in which relational theories and concepts have been employed in the recent sociological accounts of clinical encounters to trouble the classical dyadic models of clinical interaction and the related atomistic conceptions of agency and accountability. Reading this work through the theoretical contributions from feminist science studies scholarship, and particularly the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the article proposes an alternative understanding of clinical interactions, relations and practices, where relations are conceived as constitutive of individuals (objects/bodies and their attributes/identities), rather than being constituted by encounters between individuals. Key for this understanding is the reconceptualisation of clinical encounter as an apparatus of bodily production through which different agents (patients, clinicians, diseases and healthcare services) are materialised and enacted.

'I've used the word cancer but it's actually good news': discursive performativity of cancer and the identity of urological cancer services.

Drawing on the ethnographic study of urological cancer services, this article explores how a set of particular discourses embedded in the everyday clinical work in a large teaching hospital in the UK helps materialise particular configurations of cancer and related professional identities. Emerging on the intersection of specific socio-material arrangements (cancer survival rates, treatment regimens, cancer staging classifications, metaphors, clinical specialities) and operating across a number of differential relations (curable/incurable, treatable/untreatable, aggressive/nonaggressive), these configurations help constitute the categories of 'good' and 'bad' cancers as separate and contrasting entities. These categories help materialise particular distributions of power and are thus implicated in the making of specific claims about the identity of urological cancer services as unique and privileged.

Provision of cancer information as a "support for navigating the knowledge landscape": findings from a critical interpretive literature synthesis.

Purpose Of The Research: Information is often seen as a crucial tool for the support of cancer patients, facilitating their involvement in care management and in decision-making. The importance of theory in guiding provision of cancer information has been widely accepted, but there is a growing need for critical reflection on the concepts underlying approaches to information provision. This paper presents findings from a critical review of literature related to information in cancer care.