cancer, control, and causality: talking about cancer in a working‐class community

Abstract

This article examines discourse between health educators and residents of a white, inner‐city, working‐class community, a high cancer risk area targeted for a cancer education project. The community's rejection of project messages advising changes in lifestyle is described as a form of resistance. Through rhetoric about fate and cancer, community residents refuse science the power to define the terms of the discourse, and articulate a critique connecting scientific authority to wider contexts of social class and access to power and legitimacy.