Marissa Mika, Africanizing Oncology: creativity, crisis, and cancer in Uganda. Athens OH: Ohio University Press (hb US$80 – 978 0 8214 2465 0; pb US$34.95 – 978 0 8214 2509 1). 2021, 260 pp.

lights the creativity and ingenuity necessary to refashion ‘the resources and oncological technologies brought through transnational cancer research partnerships to meet the needs of Ugandan cancer patients and their caretakers’ (p. 9). This is what she means by Africanizing Oncology. Conceptually, Mika deploys the term ‘experimental infrastructure’ ‘to describe the constellation of physical facilities, research questions, care practices, data collection procedures, and human labor that makes research and care function on a day-to-day basis at the Uganda Cancer Institute’ (p. 10). This framing and up-close analysis of experimental infrastructures, along with their contingent socio-material practices, are important for understanding the space of constrained possibility that characterizes the day-to-day work of Ugandan physicians, nurses, community health workers and researchers. If ‘research is our resource’, as the UCI slogan goes (p. 9), what does this say about a global health political economy that values certain experimental infrastructures over others? This case opens a more general question: how does global public health and biomedical knowledge get constructed and travel in a world riven by extreme inequality? What are the arrangements that enable anomalous healthcare delivery practices (the construction and maintenance of novel demonstration programmes, centres of excellence, extraordinary case examples, etc.) such as the UCI to serve as ‘epistemic hinges’2 capable of translating local experience into evidence, and evidence into extra-local (or global) justifications and demands for material redistribution for care delivery? More historically deep and geographically broad case studies like this one are important sites of social-scientific research. They are diagnostic of a broader field of symbolic and material struggle and can shed light on contemporary efforts to decolonize global health.