Name: Justin Dixon

Job title: Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology

Faculty: PHP

Q1. Tell us about a project you are working on right now?

I’ve just started a Wellcome Trust Fellowship called ‘Multimorbidity and Knowledge Architectures: An Interdisciplinary Global Health Collaboration’ (KnowM). Using ethnographic and participatory methods, I will be working with patients, health professionals, researchers, health planners and policymakers in Zimbabwe and in the field of global health to co-produce an interdisciplinary framework for responding to multimorbidity in low-resource settings. A key aim is to unsettle current ‘knowledge architectures’ shaping what is known and knowable about multimorbidity. This includes single-disease- and organ-system frameworks, fragmented/siloed research and care systems and increasingly tenuous binaries such as ‘acute and chronic’, ‘communicable and non-communicable’ and ‘biological and social’. I’m working with the Zimbabwe-LSHTM Research Partnership, OPHID and the University of Zimbabwe.

Q2. What are your top skills/areas of expertise?

I’m a medical anthropologist by training and have spent most of my career trying to understand the social, political and economic dimensions of ‘global health’ and how these shape how we think about and intervene on disease. The health challenges I’ve worked on include multimorbidity, antimicrobial resistance, tuberculosis, typhoid and the ethics of clinical research. I specialise in mixed-methods approaches and am passionate about interdisciplinary, collaborative research. My regional focus is sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Q3. If everything goes to plan with your current work, what will you have achieved in 5 years time?

While it’s hard to think beyond the next COVID wave/variant at the moment, I would like to have helped inject some critical social science thinking into the formation of the global multimorbidity agenda. By then, I’ll have finished my fellowship and hope that I’ll be able to continue building on this work in my next projects. I’m also really invested in my PhD students, so I hope they’ll have finished their PhDs and moved onto something cool.

Q4. Describe your career journey so far – what were you doing before this role?

I did my undergraduate and MSc studies at the University of Cape Town and was brought up on the passionate, activist style of anthropology being taught there. I got involved in a tuberculosis research group and did my MSc project with a group called the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (SATVI), looking at the ethics of vaccine trials in an underserved community. I then continued my work with SATVI into PhD research through Durham University, where I had the chance to look deeper into the long-term effects of SATVI’s research on the local healthcare system. After my PhD, I applied for a postdoc position at LSHTM working on antimicrobial resistance. Now getting a bit of independence as a researcher, I’m starting my own projects on multimorbidity and other topics.

Q5. Have you always wanted to work in health research? 

Not exactly – I was sold on anthropology pretty early on in my studies in Cape Town, but I first wanted to go into environmental anthropology. Sometime during my MSc year, I realised that my passion lay in medical anthropology, and there was also the slight pragmatic consideration that it was considerably better funded.

Q6. What’s the most recent paper you read, and what was interesting about it?

I’m wading my way through a pathophysiology textbook at the moment. Multimorbidity is so complex, especially for someone without clinical training. I’m lost at times but really enjoying it, and what’s especially interesting for me is reading it from a critical anthropological perspective, picking up on hints of ‘the social’ running though extremely technical accounts of disease classification.

Q7. What about non-academic books/series/podcasts, are there any you’d recommend?

I’m pretty obsessed with all these true crime docuseries on Netflix at the moment!

Q8. Who’s your inspiration?

Prof. Francis Nyamnjoh, a Cameroonian anthropologist at University of Cape Town. He’s the most charismatic lecturer I’ve ever had and the person who convinced me that anthropology was the way to go. Also hard not to mention to all NHS workers, including my fiancé Zoe. Honourable mention to Marvin from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Q9. What’s your favourite thing about working at LSHTM?

Definitely the interdisciplinary environment! I don’t think you’ll find many settings in which anthropologists work so closely with clinicians, epidemiologists, economists, lab scientists, statisticians, and so many more.

Q10. If you could have dinner with any current or historical figure, who would you pick? Why?

Probably Branislaw Malinowski. I’d be super interested to hear what he’d say today knowing that more or less every anthropologist today has read his diary…

Q11. How can people get in contact with you?

Email: Justin.dixon@lshtm.ac.uk

Twitter: @JustinD_902