George Kirkham

The Viper and the Palm: space, immunity, and health in the governance of snakebite in Costa Rica

I am a health and environmental geographer interested in human-wildlife conflict, disease ecologies, and the digital mediation of disease governance.

I draw on more-than-human geography, political ecology, and medical anthropology to investigate the governance of snakebite envenomation (SBE) in Costa Rica. My research at the Instituto Clodomiro Picado, an influential Costa Rican snakebite research centre, looks at the histories of antivenom production, proteomics, and social medicine in Central America; the role of plantation agriculture in configuring snakebite’s emergence; and the making of SBE as a tropical disease.

My doctorate is funded by the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council and St John’s College. I am currently living and working in Costa Rica as a visiting researcher at the Instituto Clodomiro Picado, Universidad de Costa Rica.

Prior to starting my DPhil, I worked for the Wellcome Trust’s Snakebite Priority Area and Digital Team. This experience led me to my MSc research project, where I studied the implementation of SARPA, a snake rescue and antivenom access smartphone application developed by the Kerala Forest Department. This research inspired an interest in the digital mediation of disease governance, an area I engage with in collaboration with the Digital Ecologies research group. Outside of research, I volunteer with the Graduate Horizons mentoring programme to meet interesting young researchers and support access to higher education.

Please feel free to reach out if you would like to discuss snakebite or any other aspect of my research!

Awards

• Economic and Social Research Council Grand Union Doctoral Studentship (2023-2026)
• MSc Nature, Society and Environmental Governance, University of Oxford, Examiners' Award for Best Performance 2022
• Jesus College Oxford Charles Green Award 2022
• Sir Richard Stapley Trust Postgraduate Award 2021-22 

• Kirkham, G. (2024) Snakes and smartphones: exploring transdisciplinary design collaborations for the governance of snakebite. cultural geographies, 31(4): 591–596.