TY - JOUR
T1 - The Mutual Conditioning of Humans and Pathogens
T2 - Implications for Integrative Geographical Scholarship
AU - Scott, Christopher A.
AU - Robbins, Paul F.
AU - Comrie, Andrew C.
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based on work supported by the International Water Management Institute (Agreement 439230), the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 0948334), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science to Achieve Results Program (Grant R8327540).
PY - 2012/9
Y1 - 2012/9
N2 - We highlight an emerging mode of human-environment enquiry that is executed by cross-disciplinary teams, spurs innovation of hybrid methods, and leads to nonintuitive findings relevant beyond disciplinary framings or specific cases. The extension of this approach in health geography is particularly instructive. By focusing on material objects like soils, insects, or sewage, researchers from diverse epistemologies are compelled to translate conceptual models of disease causation, risk, and vulnerability. Humans and pathogens mutually condition one another, a result of continuously changing exposures (settlement and development patterns that modify pathogen and vector ecology) and institutional processes (legal, economic, and organizational contexts in which environments are modified and agents respond to risk). The dynamic interactions of pathogen ecologies and human institutions produce a type of coevolution, as evidenced by three cases we consider: bacteriological and helminth infections from urban wastewater irrigation, West Nile virus and its mosquito vector in the built environment, and Valley Fever and fungal distribution under changing climate and land disturbance. Place-based, contextual exposure pathways are shown to provide only a partial explanation of disease transmission and must be complemented by insights into individual and organizational agents' motivations, logics, and responses. The object in its context holds the key to understanding the intersection between physical and environmental, and human and governance geographies. Interactively identifying and pursuing theoretical and applied challenges in this manner allows researchers to move beyond entrenched subdisciplinary understandings to frame new supradisciplinary questions.
AB - We highlight an emerging mode of human-environment enquiry that is executed by cross-disciplinary teams, spurs innovation of hybrid methods, and leads to nonintuitive findings relevant beyond disciplinary framings or specific cases. The extension of this approach in health geography is particularly instructive. By focusing on material objects like soils, insects, or sewage, researchers from diverse epistemologies are compelled to translate conceptual models of disease causation, risk, and vulnerability. Humans and pathogens mutually condition one another, a result of continuously changing exposures (settlement and development patterns that modify pathogen and vector ecology) and institutional processes (legal, economic, and organizational contexts in which environments are modified and agents respond to risk). The dynamic interactions of pathogen ecologies and human institutions produce a type of coevolution, as evidenced by three cases we consider: bacteriological and helminth infections from urban wastewater irrigation, West Nile virus and its mosquito vector in the built environment, and Valley Fever and fungal distribution under changing climate and land disturbance. Place-based, contextual exposure pathways are shown to provide only a partial explanation of disease transmission and must be complemented by insights into individual and organizational agents' motivations, logics, and responses. The object in its context holds the key to understanding the intersection between physical and environmental, and human and governance geographies. Interactively identifying and pursuing theoretical and applied challenges in this manner allows researchers to move beyond entrenched subdisciplinary understandings to frame new supradisciplinary questions.
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U2 - 10.1080/00045608.2012.657511
DO - 10.1080/00045608.2012.657511
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84864571396
SN - 0004-5608
VL - 102
SP - 977
EP - 985
JO - Annals of the Association of American Geographers
JF - Annals of the Association of American Geographers
IS - 5
ER -