Health Security as Practice

As described in the 'objectives' section, the proposed activities under the fellowship are threefold. The first strand is oriented around publication. I am currently preparing a book proposal, targeted at Johns Hopkins University Press and MIT Press.

As such, the principal activity under the fellowship would be working on, and ultimately completing, this research monograph, taking my thesis research as a starting point, expanding upon the analysis, and rewriting and restructuring it for a wider audience.

In addition, I am currently co-authoring two articles with members of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Sheffield. Both are targeted at high-impact journals. The fellowship would also allow me to work on, and complete, these collaborative articles. Second, the fellowship would enable me to develop funding proposals for future research.

This next project on health security and agriculture seeks to build on and extend my doctoral research. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has shown the centrality of ecology to understanding and mitigating global health risks.

Along with deforestation, intensive animal agriculture is the prime cause of zoonotic risk (i.e. from diseases that cross the species barrier from animal to human).

Whilst the political ecology literature has considered the linkages between ecology, capitalism, and intensive animal agriculture, there has been little rigorous assessment of the links between the proliferation of zoonotic disease and socio-ecological relations.

Meanwhile, within IR, health (in)security has invariably been equated with exogenous threats: the control and containment of the cross-border spread of pathogens (usually originating in the Global South).

Though not necessarily 'wrong', this does not account for the fact that zoonotic threats can emerge from industrial agriculture practices in the Global North - not only from what is often portrayed as a 'dangerous' and 'disease-ridden' Global South. This proposed project acts as a corrective to these gaps.

In the project to be proposed to funders, I would build on the praxiographic research methods used during my PhD to undertake extensive non-participant observation of health security practices in UK agriculture, from farm to fork, in order to analyse the ways in which zoonotic risks are both understood and routinely responded to.

Once this research proposal is consolidated, the fellowship will enable me to identify and pursue any additional training I may need (particularly methods training). The third proposed activity is a stakeholder workshop on 'Health Security and Borders'.

COVID-19 has further highlighted the importance and urgency of furthering our knowledge and understanding of the linkages between health, security, and borders, highlighting the importance of understanding how health security actually works - routinely - in practice.

My PhD thesis has gone considerable way to advancing our knowledge on such questions - particularly in the case of the UK Border.

As such, it is proposed that a workshop will bring together key stakeholders with an interest in health security at the UK Border (e.g.

PHOs, Public Health England (PHE), Department for Transport (DfT), the Association of Port Health Authorities and others), as well as academics with relevant research interests, to discuss the findings and implications of cutting-edge research (by myself and other academics from a variety of disciplines) on health security practices at borders.

Importantly, the proposed workshop is intended to be the first step in creating a new Network on Health Security and Borders comprised of academic researchers and health security practitioners, to create new opportunities both for knowledge exchange and for research.

In terms of my own career ambitions, the creation of the network during this fellowship would enable me to extend my existing networks, and to position myself as one of the leading researchers in leading researchers in this subfield.