Patricia J. Lopez

I am a historical health and human geographer by training, and my research and teaching start from two interconnected themes. First, I am concerned with matters of differential value: how are different lives valued differently and how these different valuations acted upon and lived through in particular places and time? Second, I ask how do we come to care (for and about others, near and far) and in what ways? Together, these two themes focus on individuals and communities, both historically and contemporarily, that have been marginalized and racialized in moments and sites of 'benevolence' (care). With this sharp focus, geographical questions emerge about how presumably universal ethics that frame social, political, and economic relations within and between countries and populations are (or are not) actually enacted. I enter into these conversations through geographies of health and disease, examining the discursive and material practices that mark places and people as always-already diseased.

I am currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Monstrous Microbes: Geography, Race and Disease Narratives, in which I examine the co-emergence of new geographies, race and racism, and disease and outbreak narratives during the early years of global exploration, and the hauntings of these onto-epistemologies for marking the boundaries of 'humanity' and in the past, present, and future.