This book offers a radical critique of existing psychosocial research on children’s experiences of cancer and proposes an alternative view informed by recent interpretive perspectives. Exploring topics from obtaining a diagnosis of childhood cancer through to sharing decision-making and communication, it reviews a wide-ranging body of research and theory on childhood, chronic illness, and cancer. The book also examines research that has focused on how parents and other family members experience childhood illness.

Written by a sociologist, a psychologist and a practising paediatric oncologist, this book is unique in its approach and provides key reading across traditional disciplinary boundaries. In particular, the book highlights the emerging contribution of interpretive work to understanding chronic childhood illness and further develops the dialogue that has only recently emerged between the sociology of illness and the sociology of childhood.

Rethinking Experiences of Childhood Cancer is aimed at researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of social science, childhood studies, nursing, medicine, mental health care, social work, clinical psychology and other professions allied to medicine, and will also be of interest to families who have been affected by childhood cancer.