Julia Brown’s PhD was in the field of medical and psychiatric anthropology. She explored the experiences of people undertaking and overseeing clozapine treatment for ‘treatment resistant schizophrenia’ in Australia and the UK. She did her fieldwork in clozapine clinics. This work resulted in her 2022 monograph, The Clozapine Clinic: Health Agency in High-Risk Conditions.

Why anthropology? Having worked in public health policy, her interest in health inequities as they are lived and perceived by both highly vulnerable and less vulnerable people led her to pursue ethnographic research.  As for what first sparked her anthropological thinking, it was Mary Douglas’ attention to social binaries and contradictions, which opened up for her a space of analysis less considered by cognitive, psychological or macro-sociological paradigms (Julia also holds a BSc (Psychology) and majored in sociology as well as anthropology for her BA).

TFS: Julia was our website content manager, co-editor and regular contributor to The Familiar Strange blog, and regular contributor to the podcast.