Jonah Lipton is an anthropologist and post-doctoral researcher based at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and the ESRC Centre for Public Authority and International Development. He is a specialist in the anthropology of Sierra Leone and West Africa, with research interests in youth, family life, crisis, informal economies, global health, and humanitarianism.
Jonah’s research stems from long-term ethnographic fieldwork centred in an urban neighbourhood of Freetown, Sierra Leone. His PhD research, undertaken immediately before and during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, explores young men’s experiences of the global health crisis, particularly within the intimate social and economic arenas of the home, family, and neighbourhood. This project both provides a grounded contextual perspective on crisis, as well a re-thinking of long-standing anthropological theory and methodology as it applies to the contemporary moment. He has since returned to his fieldsite to research ‘family politics’, focusing on family meetings and everyday politics in and around the home.
Jonah completed his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ in 2017, having received a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Oxford.
Jonah convenes the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ Critical African Writings reading group. He plays jazz piano in his spare time.