The Specter of Comparison: Thinking Beyond Numbers

This talk examines the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It argues that we urgently need to look beyond the virus if we want to understand the real seriousness of what is happening today. How did we end up in a space of thinking, acting, and feeling that is driven by an obsession with numbers? How reliable are these numbers and what kind of work are they doing?

About the Speaker:

Carlo Caduff is Associate Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, Director of Postgraduate Research Studies and Chair of the Culture, Medicine and Power research group. As a social scientist, his research examines the social, cultural, political, technological, and economic dimensions of cancer care in India. Dr Caduff is Principle Investigator of the Grid Oncology Wellcome Trust project, a five-year collaborative research program on the changing landscape of cancer care in India. Earlier, he worked on a project on pandemic preparedness in the United States, published in a book titled “The Pandemic Perhaps” (University of California Press 2015).

Dr Caduff is an affiliate of King's India Institute and Visiting Faculty at the Graduate Institute Geneva. With colleagues at King’s, Harvard and Johns Hopkins, he launched the Global Social Medicine network to link, support, and build upon existing interdisciplinary social medicine programs across the world. Dr Caduff received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.