@kirkham.bsky.social
PhD candidate at Oxford Geography interested in snakebites and the politics of global health https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/graduate/research/gkirkham.html
Our new piece out today in Times Higher Education about the threats to Geography in the UK - particularly fieldwork - please do share. It links to a recent snapshot survey on the challenges being faced in UK HE, which highlights the inequities of the challenges, but also fears of what is yet to come
17.02.2026 09:21 — 👍 41 🔁 33 💬 1 📌 2
The proliferation of digital tools in public health has spurred the emergence of ‘digital health’, a term encompassing the varied technologies that utilise digital media to manage illness and support wellbeing (Lupton, 2022). Meanwhile, the rise of One Health as an influential public health paradigm – and with it the idea that animals, humans, and the environment form an interdependent system that should be governed in a coordinated, interdisciplinary manner to secure positive health for all – has contributed to new technologies that seek to monitor and manage disease emergence across species lines (Braverman, 2022). Despite this ambition, much geographical analysis has argued that digital health interventions are anthropocentric, attending to non-humans through modes of surveillance and datafication in so much as they represent a risk to human health, furthering an unequal public health paradigm that leaves little space for local contingency and the wants and needs of non-human actors (Hinchliffe, 2015; Lupton, 2022). Nevertheless, recent geographical work channeling more affirmative ‘digital ecologies’ approaches to the digitisation of more-than-human relations has considered how digital technologies also cultivate understanding of and responsiveness to how pathogens, disease vectors, reservoirs, and environments in specific contexts are implicated in and impacted by disease emergence, throwing light on how digitisation may reconfigure disease ecologies to enable life in less-pathological configurations (Turnbull, 2022; Kirkham, 2026).
Expanding on understandings of digitisation as a process that materially configures disease ecologies to produce programmes of biopolitical intervention, intersubjective experiences of illness and wellbeing, and uneven health outcomes across species lines, this panel interrogates how digital technologies are shaping whose, and what, health is made to matter across diverse contexts. How can we merge digital geographies and health geography scholarship to apprehend the digital mediation of illness and wellbeing? What happens when digital health technologies are inserted into unequal health geographies? How do these technologies reconfigure the topologies of more-than-human relations that drive disease emergence? And how may digital health technology sediment or open taken-for-granted understandings of public health? We are interested in papers answering: • The role of digital technology in practices of biosecurity and disease surveillance at the human-animal-environment nexus, including the ways in which processes of digital datafication, visualisation, and mapping alter how disease situations are apprehended and acted within; • how digital health technologies mediate the experiential dimensions of human-non-human encounter in the context of disease governance; • the political economies of digital disease governance and the role of digital technologies in challenging or supporting pathological industries; • the role of digital technologies as they operate within agro-industrial and veterinary sectors, and the consequences this has for labour, care practices, and more-than-human health; • how material infrastructures of the digital, such as data centres, chip production, and e-waste, are implicated in disease emergence and environmental health; • how digital technologies may or may not transform conventional public health approaches to facilitate the assembly of ‘healthy publics’ or a ‘more-than-One Health’ agenda (Hinchliffe, 2015; Hinchliffe et al., 2018).
Ray Chan and I are convening a panel at the upcoming RGS-IBG 2026 conference titled "Digital Disease Ecologies of More-than-Human Health". Please see the abstract below, and if you are interested in attending send george.kirkham@sjc.ox.ac.uk a 250 word abstract with a short bio by the 23rd Feb
27.01.2026 14:03 — 👍 7 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
The proliferation of digital tools in public health has spurred the emergence of ‘digital health’, a term encompassing the varied technologies that utilise digital media to manage illness and support wellbeing (Lupton, 2022). Meanwhile, the rise of One Health as an influential public health paradigm – and with it the idea that animals, humans, and the environment form an interdependent system that should be governed in a coordinated, interdisciplinary manner to secure positive health for all – has contributed to new technologies that seek to monitor and manage disease emergence across species lines (Braverman, 2022). Despite this ambition, much geographical analysis has argued that digital health interventions are anthropocentric, attending to non-humans through modes of surveillance and datafication in so much as they represent a risk to human health, furthering an unequal public health paradigm that leaves little space for local contingency and the wants and needs of non-human actors (Hinchliffe, 2015; Lupton, 2022). Nevertheless, recent geographical work channeling more affirmative ‘digital ecologies’ approaches to the digitisation of more-than-human relations has considered how digital technologies also cultivate understanding of and responsiveness to how pathogens, disease vectors, reservoirs, and environments in specific contexts are implicated in and impacted by disease emergence, throwing light on how digitisation may reconfigure disease ecologies to enable life in less-pathological configurations (Turnbull, 2022; Kirkham, 2026).
Expanding on understandings of digitisation as a process that materially configures disease ecologies to produce programmes of biopolitical intervention, intersubjective experiences of illness and wellbeing, and uneven health outcomes across species lines, this panel interrogates how digital technologies are shaping whose, and what, health is made to matter across diverse contexts. How can we merge digital geographies and health geography scholarship to apprehend the digital mediation of illness and wellbeing? What happens when digital health technologies are inserted into unequal health geographies? How do these technologies reconfigure the topologies of more-than-human relations that drive disease emergence? And how may digital health technology sediment or open taken-for-granted understandings of public health? We are interested in papers answering: • The role of digital technology in practices of biosecurity and disease surveillance at the human-animal-environment nexus, including the ways in which processes of digital datafication, visualisation, and mapping alter how disease situations are apprehended and acted within; • how digital health technologies mediate the experiential dimensions of human-non-human encounter in the context of disease governance; • the political economies of digital disease governance and the role of digital technologies in challenging or supporting pathological industries; • the role of digital technologies as they operate within agro-industrial and veterinary sectors, and the consequences this has for labour, care practices, and more-than-human health; • how material infrastructures of the digital, such as data centres, chip production, and e-waste, are implicated in disease emergence and environmental health; • how digital technologies may or may not transform conventional public health approaches to facilitate the assembly of ‘healthy publics’ or a ‘more-than-One Health’ agenda (Hinchliffe, 2015; Hinchliffe et al., 2018).
Ray Chan and I are convening a panel at the upcoming RGS-IBG 2026 conference titled "Digital Disease Ecologies of More-than-Human Health". Please see the abstract below, and if you are interested in attending send george.kirkham@sjc.ox.ac.uk a 250 word abstract with a short bio by the 23rd Feb
27.01.2026 14:03 — 👍 7 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
New article for @tibg.bsky.social. Through the case of digital snake rescue, I merge @digicologies.bsky.social and disease ecology work to develop the lens of 'digital disease ecologies' - a way to analyse how digital encounter and datafication configure disease emergence and multispecies health.
23.01.2026 10:10 — 👍 5 🔁 7 💬 1 📌 1
Pleased to share this new collaborative paper concerning systems approaches to the governance of pharmaceutical pollution in
@thelancetplanet.bsky.social www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
A great article by @kirkham.bsky.social via @biosocieties.bsky.social : Making sense of snakebite: the place of biological toxins in social scientific analyses of toxicity (OA) link.springer.com/article/10.1...
24.11.2025 17:22 — 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Pleased to share this paper for BioSocieties on snakebite in Kerala. I explore how social scientific theories of toxicity aid in conceiving of the structural vulnerabilities, diagnostic uncertainty, and multispecies health impacts that characterise snakebite's public health response.
19.08.2025 07:10 — 👍 17 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 0
'We did not see anything' - fantastic short story exploring the complexities of ecotourism, fortress conservation, and the emotional connections that displaced peoples retain towards their land
23.04.2025 01:16 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1
"Despite each bodymap being unique, there are recurring motifs, such as shadows. “Participants use them in the sense that they are only a shadow of what they were before and that they feel left behind. The world has moved on, but they still live in the pandemic.”
www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
