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Short abstract:

While the transformation of matter through fire doesn’t go unnoticed, radiation postpones patients’ fear of the impact of Gamma rays. The unknowability of radiation and its silence(s) as well as visual invisibility subverts responsibility and accountability in a radiotherapy unit in Rabat, Morocco.

Long abstract:

Unlike fire, radiation is invisible. It penetrates the skin, burns and shrinks tumors. Radiation, dosimetry, and artificially intelligent algorithms for radiotherapy treatment as “materialities” or processes are not easy to grasp for all cancer patients. Besides the technician’s voice announcing the beginning and the end of the treatment through a microphone, cancer patients are faced with silence during their daily radiotherapy sessions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a ‘smart’ oncology private clinic in Rabat, Morocco, this paper centers the narratives of two protagonists, Hamid and Nadia, to illustrate the ways in which waiting “inside” and “outside” the “machine” emerges as an active correspondence between religious prayers and the commitment to attributing healing to Divinity and God. The anthropology of the unknowable centers silence as one of its paramount elements. While silence complicates interpretation (Weller, 2017), perception (or lack thereof) calls for mediative tools. What happens in moments in which human sensoriality becomes limited?

The paper centers the argument that while the transformation of matter through fire doesn’t go unnoticed, radiation postpones patients’ fear of the impact of Gamma rays. The unknowability of radiation and its silence(s) as well as visual invisibility subverts responsibility and accountability inside the radiotherapy unit. By engaging and considering human-machine interaction, the paper shall explore a landscape of techno-solutionism that increases alienation for cancer patients, both in understanding and feeling cared for. As such, bringing further into view the visible and invisible frontiers of technology and radiotherapy planning algorithms that mediate cancer patients’ care trajectories.