Presenting health and medical geography: People, places, and change

Assessments of the development of geography as a discipline, and studies of sub-disciplinary development within geography, have generally focused on the subject matter under study. Consideration has concentrated on topics, theories, methods, and paradigm shifts identified by analyses of published literature. There has been rather less interest in the spatialisation of the practice and performance of the discipline by people and institutions (though there have been exceptions) and equally little attention to the evidence provided by geographical conferences. We address these lacunae in current knowledge through a quantitative study of changing disciplinary endeavour in health geography as evidenced by participation in the International Medical Geography Symposia. For 35 years this biennial meeting has been the flagship conference for health and medical geographers. We have obtained, reviewed, and coded the proceedings of all 17 symposia, analysing the submitted papers by location of symposia, lead authorship, affiliation, and country of authorship. We investigate the globalisation of the sub-discipline and changes in key institutional involvement. Novel network analysis methods are used to identify changing linkages between research centres. What emerges is a complex sub-discipline driven by the changing neoliberal context of higher education and marked by both continuities and discontinuities in its practitioner networks.