Title of the thesis: Challenging the etiology of childhood cancers from environmental health mobilizations and perspectives.
Supervisor: Vololona Rabeharisoa.
The thesis focuses on collective forms of action that lead to and aim to investigate the causes of childhood cancer clusters in France, from the 1990s to the present day. The aim is to explain the configurations that lead local childhood cancer clusters to different kinds of alerts, amplifications, relays and, more generally, mobilizations. Therefore, this research explores the diversity of orientations taken by the actors involved in these mobilizations, including: [i] local and preventive actions, i.e. the elimination or removal of risks identified and suspected as playing a role in the occurrence of local and listed childhood cancers; [ii] the inclusion of the childhood cancer issue in a network of other causes that make up the vast field of environmental health; [iii] the democratization of expertise through the promotion and inclusion of forms of knowledge that tend to be excluded from it; [iv] putting, maintaining and extending the topic of the origins and causes of childhood cancers in the political-scientific research agendas. In consequence, this thesis aims to understand the conditions that explain how mobilizations have made access and circulate in new social, political, academic, and expert spaces, with an explicit focus on the hypothesis of environmental causes of childhood cancers. These elements shed light on how pitfalls, controversies, and ambiguities surrounding etiology—and, more specifically, potential environmental causes—are emerging as a contemporary research theme in the political-scientific arena of childhood cancer in France.