Skip to main content
School of Geography

Dr Stephen Taylor, MA MPhil PhD (Cambridge)

Stephen

Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Deputy Dean for Education (Humanities and Social Sciences)

Email: stephen.taylor@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Bancroft Building, Room 2.09a

Profile

My research and teaching interests centre on the geographies of biomedicine and global health. This work turns on the thought that medical advances occur today in a world of remarkable economic, political and health inequalities. Health, poverty and exclusion are not merely biological, economic and social concepts but also political categories that are produced and contested. My work considers the political, legal, financial, and historical structures that secure the health of some while exposing the lives of others to the slow violence of illness and abandonment.

I have examined the geographies of life through three main avenues of research:

  1. The globalisation of clinical trials to South Africa: This work explores the pharmaceutical industry's spatial and profit-maximising tactics and exposes the ongoing marginalisation, dispossession, and exploitation of human subjects in clinical trials. I am particularly interested in tracing the production of promise and abandonment in biomedical research.
  2. The political geographies of global health and development: This work traces the emergence of ‘global health’ as an epistemological object and empirically focuses on global mental health (at field sites in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo) and the contested spatialities unfolding around the eradication of polio (at sites in northwestern Pakistan and northern Nigeria).
  3. Critical geographies of philanthropic practice: This work examines the historical and contemporary practice of philanthropy, with a particular focus on disease eradication and planetary health. In so doing, I explore this increasingly pertinent but by no means politically neutral form of ‘helping’.

My research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Academy, the Rotary Foundation, the Commonwealth Trust, and the Smuts Memorial Fund. I am also a member of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), the Association of American Geographers, and the British International Studies Association.

Back to top