Empirically, my research can be organized around three themes; each theme questions different geographies of “life”. 

1. Microscopic Life. How do cities prepare for future infectious disease outbreaks? This line of inquiry investigates human migration, public health, and urban planning, but also how disease outbreaks are tied to environments and people.

2. Excess Life. How do experts demarcate people they deem to be unproductive? I examine the emergence of different population categories, such as healthy national workforce of the early 20th century, “disadvantaged child” of the 1960s, and most recently those diagnosed along autistic spectrum disorder.

3. Life Sciences. How are scientific theories used and abused within the longstanding, and tired, debate of nature versus nurture? In turn, what practices, and the political economy behind these practices, arise from these theories? I track debates in bacteriology, IQ and child development, urban toxicity, and the funding of biomedicine research and development.

Current Research Projects

+ My current project examines how diseased migration formed as a concept, distinct from a healthy national population. My postdoctoral research project, entitled “Sick Pilgrims, Quarantine Science: Managing Populations after the Fifth Cholera Pandemic, 1892-1924”, asks why the Hajj pilgrimage became the dominant model for health experts who imagined the problem of sick itinerate populations.

+ I examine how “disadvantaged children” became a site to compensate and intervene in, during a period of national crisis in the 1960s. I focus on specific experts in the War on Poverty, such as child psychologists, educators, and pre-school policy planners. I examine how experts constructed and evaluated children’s mental growth in concert with their home environments.

Future Project

+ I am working on developing a new project, which will bring my research questions to bear on the present by investigating autism spectrum disorders. Knowledge of autism remains fixed within the realms of biomedicine, the cause scripted by nature (genetics, tainted vaccines, developmental neurobiology) and nurture (environmental toxins, endocrine disruptors, home environments). The “epidemic” of autism has been declared a national problem in the US, materialized through federal shifts in policy and increased funding. Nonetheless, a growing autism rights movement has challenged this ‘cure autism’ agenda. Through my future research, I will apply conclusions that came out of my dissertation about how to reframe health, away from normal/pathological and towards the concept of “spectrum.”

Past Research

+ In my dissertation I researched cholera, marsh reclamation, and the science and expertise of urban health. I traced the historical links between the state control of cholera with the ecology and economy of waterfronts to show the ways that they reinforce one another. My research unpacks how North American cities prepared for cholera pandemic that threatened, but never became the crisis that it was feared to be.

+ In my Masters of Environmental Studies and Planning, I wrote on food-based diseases, agriculture, and urban growth. I interrogated how and why avian influenza looms large on the horizons of North American cities. This research demystified actions taken in cities and nations against contemporary disease outbreaks and opened the door to my larger historical inquiry of epidemic crises.

On-Going Interests

+ The debates around overpopulation, migration, and the policing of borders.
+ The history and political economy of vaccine innovation, along with the current economics of drug logistics firms.
+ How the funding of scientific research influences, and is influenced, by national politics.
+ How the financial crisis of 2008 and austerity measures has restructured everyday life, in particular through health and social reproduction.
+ Newly emerging diseases, such as H1N1, H5N1, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Cholera and Crisis: State Health and the Geographies of Future Epidemics
Paul Stephen Brierley Jackson
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Geography
University of Toronto
2011 

Abstract

In the fall of 1892, fear of cholera was pervasive in North America. Ten years into the fifth international cholera epidemic—that lasted from 1881 to 1896—cholera had been raging in the Middle East, India, and Europe, but the disease had yet to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The maritime traffic of immigrants from Europe was continuous, and each migrant ship potentially carried the disease. Doctors, government officials, and politicians were not asking ‘will cholera come?’, but rather when. While no one got sick or died of cholera in the city of Toronto in 1892, the crisis and fear of imminent cholera was very real. Drawing on archival research, this dissertation maps how a cholera crisis was shaped by urgency, immediacy, and speculation on the future. My argument will show how the geography of an epidemic is not limited to the presence of a disease. If crises are times of profound activity, how does this event need to be substantiated in order to produce change? This dissertation follows how cholera was integral to producing an object called proliferating life that held together: migrating populations, growing cities, and degeneration; marshland as the source of disease; the medical theory of zymosis that explained how disease outbreaks got out of control; and Malthusian ‘laws’ of population. Health experts used correlation and synecdoche to visualize these relations. However, these experts needed a stable institutional base to articulate both their fears and their recommendations, which included: professionalized expanding health boards, as social infrastructures; reclaiming Toronto’s marshland of Ashbridge’s Bay; and a health ideology built upon the fear of future epidemics, immigration, and a growing economic rationale for health. By the early 20th century, state health became instrumental to a “national vitality”, a practice of government intervention that I frame as bureaucratic bio-economy.

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Here is the bibliography from my dissertation.

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This second image is schema of my dissertation (or a ‘map’).  I attempted to combine a time line of outbreaks, along with different theories of disease, international pandemics, and public health institutions.