Dr Stephen Taylor, MA MPhil PhD (Cambridge)

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.

Teaching

For 2025-26, I am contributing interactive lectures, practical classes, and seminars to the following undergraduate and postgraduate modules:

• GEG6158: Medicine, Politics and Global Health Histories (convenor)

I also contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation modules by advising students in the design and implementation of independent geographical research projects.

As a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), I am committed to professionalism in teaching and learning that is aligned with the UK Professional Standards Framework. As my interests trace the promissory yet violent geographies of our present, I deliver high-quality research-led teaching that provokes and rouses students to purposeful action. In the classroom, I promote student participation, group learning and critical reflection to encourage and rouse seemingly ‘ordinary’ people to meet the legion political challenges of our emergent present.

I have been nominated by QMUL for Guardian and Times Higher Education (THE) University Awards (for research-led teaching on the housing crisis) and nominated as an ‘Assessment and Feedback Champion’ in the QMSU Awards (for innovative use of peer and online feedback).

Outside of specific modules, I am developing scholarship agendas within the discipline. I have published pedagogical research on interdisciplinary learning and communication. I have also been invited to discuss this influential work – developed initially as part of a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) at QMUL – with practitioners at the University of Exeter, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, and the University of New South Wales. I have been successful in receiving funding from QMUL Outreach funds to support the transition to university resources aimed at enhancing student experience and opportunity (Springboards, Succeed, Pathways to Success).

Research

Research Interests:

My research sits at the intersection of health and political geography, with a particular focus on the geographies of biomedicine and global health. I am interested in how health interventions, medical knowledge, and pharmaceutical practices are unevenly distributed across space, and how these processes shape experiences of illness and care. My work contributes to sub-disciplinary debates in global health geography by critically examining issues such as the globalisation of clinical trials and the politics of mental health interventions. For example, my research has explored how trauma is understood and treated in conflict-affected settings such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, highlighting the limits of universalised global mental health frameworks and emphasising the importance of local, context-specific experiences. Similarly, my work on clinical trials in South Africa interrogates the spatial and ethical dynamics of pharmaceutical research, particularly in relation to inequality and exploitation.

More broadly, my research contributes to core disciplinary concerns within human geography around power, space, and knowledge production. I approach global health not as a neutral or technical field, but as one shaped by political, economic, and geopolitical forces, including philanthropy, security agendas, and global governance structures. In doing so, my work extends critical geographical perspectives on uneven development and global inequality. A growing strand of my research also engages with questions of ethics and representation, particularly through the concept of witnessing, which reflects on the researcher's role in encountering and representing suffering. This work contributes to ongoing disciplinary conversations about reflexivity, responsibility, and the positionality of researchers.

My research is also inherently interdisciplinary, engaging with and contributing to debates in public health, development studies, political science, and science and technology studies. I am particularly interested in how insights from human geography can inform and challenge dominant approaches within global health policy and practice. This includes engagement with practitioner and policy communities, as well as contributions to scholarship agendas, where I explore how interdisciplinary approaches can support critical and transformative learning. Across my work, I seek to connect political economy, health systems, and lived experience in order to better understand and address global health inequalities.

Publications

Journal Articles

• Taylor, S. (2026) "Witnessing health and place: Sebastião Salgado and the photographic legacy of polio eradication," Area forthcoming (available online)
• Taylor, S., Mavinga, L. and Bashiga, M. (2023) "Unbracketing the multiplicity of trauma in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo," Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 44, 339-355 (available online) (awarded the 2023 SJTG best paper prize)
• Taylor, S. (2020) “The tyranny of empty shelves: scarcity and the political manufacture of antiretroviral stock-outs in South Kivu, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45, 619-634 (available online) (selected for the April 2020 Contextualising Coronavirus Geographically special virtual issue)
• Taylor, S. (2019) “The long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher,” Fennia 197, 183-199 (available online)
• Taylor, S. (2018) “After polio: imagining, planning, and delivering a world beyond eradication” Health and Place 54, 29-36 (available online)
• Taylor, S. (2018) “To understand and be understood: facilitating interdisciplinary learning through the promotion of communicative competence” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 42, 126-142 (available online)
• Taylor, S. (2017) “Making space for restoration: epistemological pluralism within mental health interventions in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo,” Area 49, 342-348 (available online) (selected for the July 2022 Geographies Beyond Recovery special virtual issue)
• Taylor, S. (2016) “In pursuit of zero: polio, global health security and the politics of eradication in Peshawar, Pakistan,” Geoforum 69, 106-116 (available online)
• Nally, D. and Taylor, S. (2015) “The politics of self-help: the Rockefeller Foundation, philanthropy and the ‘long’ Green Revolution,” Political Geography 49, 51-63 (available online)

Book Chapters

• Taylor, S. (2023) “Poliomyelitis and child paralysis” in S. Romaniuk and M. Thapa (eds.) Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Global Security Studies (Palgrave Macmillan; London) (available online)
• Brown, T., Calkin, S., Holden, K., Reid-Henry, S. and Taylor, S. (2021) "How to have theory in a pandemic: a critical reflection on the discourses of Covid-19" in G. Andrews, V. Crooks, J Pearce and J. Messina (eds.) Covid-19 and Similar Futures: Pandemic Geographies (Springer; Berlin), pp. 93-99 (available online)
• Brown, T. and Taylor, S. (2018) “Global health geographies” in V. Crooks, G. J. Andrews and J. Pearce (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Health Geography (Routledge; London), pp. 14-19 (available online)
• Taylor, S. (2016) “‘Why must we stay in this cage? Governing sexuality in biomedical research” in G. Brown and K Browne (eds.) The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities (Routledge; London), pp. 275-282 (available online)
  

Research Reports

•  Taylor, S. (2019) “Claude Barlow and the International Health Division’s campaign to eradicate bilharzia (schistosomiasis) in Egypt, 1929-1940,” Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports (available online)

Reviews

• Taylor, S. (2019) “Book Review: Bioinformation by Bronwyn Parry and Beth Greenhough,” cultural geographies 26(1), 152-153 (available online)
• Taylor, S. (2013) "Book Review: Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa by Mark Hunter," Gender, Place and Culture 20(1), 129-131 (available online)
• Taylor, S. (2010) "Book Review: War, Violence and Population: Making the Body Count by James Tyner," European Planning Studies 18(1), 145-146 (available online)
• Taylor, S. (2009) "Conference Report: Comparative Colonialisms," Journal of Historical Geography 35(3), 592-593 (available online)

Supervision

My research interests are centred on: (1) the critical geographies of biomedicine and clinical trials, (2) the political geographies of global health and development, (3) geographical approaches to global mental health, and (4) governmentality and health in contemporary and historical perspective.

Please do get in contact if you are considering applying for a PhD at QMUL and consider there to be a fit between our research interests. I particularly welcome applications from students interested in developing proposals for the ESRC 1+3 and +3 funding routes available through the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS-DTP).

Current graduate research students

• Rita Sharma PANDEYA (with Tim Brown, QMUL Geography) PhD – QMUL: ‘Intersecting vulnerabilities: flood disasters, social inequality, and disaster governance in a transforming Nepal’ (2021-2025). ESRC +3 Studentship.

Former graduate research students

• Glyn HAWKSWORTH (with Jane Wills, QMUL Geography). MRes Geography – QMUL: ‘Recovery and the responsibilisation of drug users in UK policy’ (2014-2015). ESRC 1+3 Studentship.
• Paulina SZYMCZYNSKA (with Stefan Priebe, QMUL Wolfson Institute of Population Health). PhD – QMUL: ‘Retention of participants with mental health problems in non-pharmacological clinical trials’ (2014-2017). QMUL Life Sciences Institute PhD Studentship.

Public Engagement

As part of my ongoing interest in the geographies of biomedicine, global health and philanthropy, I have engaged in an academic and consultancy capacity with a series of key organisations in these fields, including the World Health Organization, Gavi, UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rotary Foundation, multinational pharmaceutical companies, and national departments of health (South Africa, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Alongside these engagements with global health elites, I have provided pro bono consultancy for health-related NGOs in Cape Town. I am a trustee of the Bethel HIV Treatment and Prevention Centre in the city’s Khayelitsha district.

I have also mentored postgraduate researchers in developing impact activities targeting external stakeholders, including East London NHS Foundation Trust, Southend-on-Sea Borough Council, and the Nepal Centre for Disaster Management. I have facilitated undergraduate student-led engagement work with London Citizens, Roman Road Trust and Tower Hamlets Council, influencing local priorities and practices. As a Widening Participation lead for the Department of Geography & Environmental Science, I contributed to the delivery of outreach programmes in over 60 schools in London. I developed partnerships with intermediaries such as the Royal Geographical Society and Geographical Association. I also enjoy speaking to secondary school students about connections between my research and the curriculum.