Dr Tim Brown

Dr Tim Brown
Lecturer in Human Geography

School of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
Tel: 020 7882 8465
Fax: 020 7882 7479
Email: tim.brown@qmul.ac.uk

Research interests:

 

I am a geographer whose primary research interest lies in three broad areas: the critical geographies of public health, the geography of global health, and the inter-relationship between human health and 'nature'. While distinct areas of research activity, there is both theoretical and methodological overlap in each of these areas. Notably in terms of my development of a Foucauldian-informed critique and my use of discourse analysis.

    

I have also contributed to disciplinary understanding through my role as a co-editor of A Companion to Health and Medical Geography (with Sara McLafferty and Graham Moon). A role that led to my recent invitation to act as the advisory editor on health geography for the forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society (William Cockerham, Editor-in-Chief, Wiley-Blackwell). In addition, I am the Secretary/Treasurer of the RGS/IBG Geography of Health Research Group.

 

Critical geographies of public health

First developed in my doctoral research, “AIDS in the UK: Modes of representation, systems of governance” (University of Portsmouth, 1997), this area of interest is primarily concerned with advancing a critical discussion of ‘new’ public health discourse within geography.

 

Drawing most directly on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this research considers the ways in which epidemiological notions of risk are deployed in public health discourse. More specifically, it focuses on engaging critically with the production of healthy subjectivity in contemporary society (see Brown, 2000; Brown and Duncan 2002; Brown and Burges Watson, 2010).

 

The geography of global health

This research area is primarily concerned with an exploration of contemporary global health discourse. My interest in these debates emerged out of work conducted into human mobility and infectious disease with colleagues in the Department of Geography, Loughborough University (see Bell, Brown and Faire, 2006; Budd, Bell and Brown 2009).

 

More recently, the focus of my research has been on developing geographical understanding of the place of non-communicable disease within this discourse (see Brown and Bell, 2007, 2008) and on the associated securitization of health-related issues (Brown forthcoming).

 

I have received a Research Development Initiative grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to develop this latter aspect of my research in a project which aims to develop insights into the contemporary meanings of ‘food security’ (with Sarah Wakefield, University of Toronto).

 

Human health and the ‘natural environment’

My research in this area seeks to explore how differing conceptualisations of the relationship between health and ‘nature’ (and ‘greenspace’) were translated into practice in 19th and early 20th century Britain. This work is an extension of previous work that I have conducted into health and ‘greenspace’ (see Almond et al, 2004; Brown and Bell, 2007) and forms a key part of my collaborative work with colleagues in the Healthy Environments Research Programme (HERP).

 

The main project that I am currently working on explores the transformation of disused cemeteries and burial grounds into spaces for the promotion of health and wellbeing in the overcrowded districts of East London, circa 1880-1920. The project is funded by a Wellcome Trust travel grant and is being conducted in collaboration with Steve Cummins (QMUL).

Publications:

Books

  • Moon, G., Gould, M., Brown, T. et al. (2000) Epidemiology for nurses and the caring professions. Buckingham: Open University Press.
  • Brown, T., McLafferty, S. & Moon, G. (Eds) (2010) A Companion to Health and Medical Geography. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.


Chapters in Books

  • Brown, T. (2009) ‘Health services restructuring’, in R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (Eds), International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography.
  • Brown, T. & Burges-Watson, D. (2010) ‘Governing un/healthy populations’, in T. Brown, S. McLafferty & G. Moon (Eds), A Companion to Health and Medical Geography.
  • Brown, T., McLafferty, S., & Moon, G. (2010) ‘Introduction’, in T. Brown, S. McLafferty & G. Moon (Eds), A Companion to Health and Medical Geography.
  • Craddock, S. & Brown, T. (2009) ‘Representing the un/healthy body’, in T. Brown, S. McLafferty & G. Moon (Eds), A Companion to Health and Medical Geography.
  • Brown, T. (2002) ‘Using secondary data sources’, in P. Shurmer-Smith (Ed.), Doing cultural geography (pp. 101-110). London: Sage.
  • Moon, G. & Brown, T. (1998) ‘Place, space and the reform of the British national health service’, in W. Gesler & R. Kearns (Eds), Putting health into place: Landscapes, identity and well-being. (pp. 270-288). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.


Articles in Journals

  • Brown, T. “Vulnerability is universal”: considering the place of 'security' and 'vulnerability' within contemporary global health discourse. Social Science & Medicine (In Press).

 

  • Brown, T., Budd, L., Bell, M., Rendell, H. The ‘soft science’ of global climate change: reporting on landscape transformation and threatened identity in the British newspaper press. Public Understanding of Science (In Press).
  • Budd, L., Bell, M., & Brown, T. (2009) Of plagues, planes and politics: controlling the global spread of infectious diseases by air. Political Geography 28, 426-435.
  • Brown, T. & Bell, M. (2008) Imperial or postcolonial governance: dissecting the genealogy of a global public health strategy. Social Science & Medicine 67, 1571-1579.
  • Brown, T. & Bell, M. (2007) Off the couch and on the move: global public health and the medicalisation of nature. Social Science & Medicine, 64. 1343-1354.
  • Bell, M., Brown, T. & Faire, L. (2006) Germs, genes and postcolonial geographies: reading the return of tuberculosis to Leicester, UK, 2001. Cultural Geographies, 13, 577-599.
  • Brown, T. & Moon, G. (2004) From Siam to New York: Jacques May and the ‘foundation’ of US medical geography. Journal of Historical Geography, 30, 747-763.
  • Brown, T. (2003) Towards an understanding of local protest: healthcare reform and community participation. Social and Cultural Geography, 4, 489-506.
  • Brown, T. & Duncan, C. (2002) Placing geographies of public health. Area, 33, 361-369.
  • Moon, G. & Brown, T. (2001) Closing Bart’s: community and resistance in contemporary London hospital policy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19, 43-59.
  • Brown, T. (2000) AIDS, risk and the governance of social space. Social Science & Medicine, 50, 1273-1284.
  • Brown, T. & Duncan, C. (2000) London’s burning: spaces for smoking, spaces for health. Health and Place, 6, 363-375.
  • Moon, G. & Brown, T. (2000) Towards localised space: discourse, governmentality and UK health policy in the mid-1990s. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 25, 65-76.


Other publications

  • Brown, T. (2008) Book review: Gandy, M. and Zumla, A., editors, 2003: The return of the white plague: global poverty and the ‘new’ tuberculosis. Bashford, A., editor, 2006: Medicine at the border: disease, globalization and security, 1850 to the present. Progress in Human Geography 32, 719-723.
  • Almond, L., Bell, M., Brown, T., Buxton, K., & Carr, R. (2004) Health, access to green-space & informal outdoor recreation within the Greenwood Community Forest and Nottingham City. Unpublished report for the Countryside Agency.

Undergraduate teaching:

 

I am the convenor of two undergraduate modules: GEG4109 ‘Research Methods in Human Geography’ (Course Convenor) and GEG5107 ‘Health, Inequality & Society’ (Course Convenor). In addition I also co-teach on a number of other modules across the Geography degree programme, including GEG4102 ‘Environment, Nature and Society’.

Postgraduate teaching:

I am currently co-supervising two ESRC ‘CASE award’ studentships (Claire Thompson ‘Environmental determinants of diet: understanding the mediating role of culture’; Ania Wachnicka ‘Perspectives on self harm, integrating evidence from national surveys, local health outcomes and local patient views’) and would welcome applications from graduates interested in undertaking health-related doctoral research in the following areas: critical public health, global health discourse, human/nature/health interactions.