Multimorbidity and Knowledge Architectures: An Interdisciplinary Global Health Collaboration

As people live longer, the coexistence of multiple conditions in one individual – ‘multimorbidity’ – becomes more common.

Scholars across the biomedical sciences have expressed concern that research, training and care systems remain organised along single-disease and single-organ-system lines and that new ways of producing knowledge about multimorbidity are needed.

Medical anthropologists, with well-established strengths in illuminating and unsettling dominant frameworks, are ideally equipped to collaborate with biomedical scientists to articulate and respond to the challenge posed by multimorbidity.

Using the analytic frame of ‘epistemic infrastructures’, referring here to the fragmented global assemblages through which knowledge about (multi)morbidity is produced and legitimised, I will investigate how individuals in different settings and communities of practice understand and engage with multimorbidity.

Further, I will co-produce with them a conceptual framework for responding to this complex bio-social phenomenon.

To achieve this, I propose a collaborative multi-site ethnographic study in global health institutions in the UK and research, training and care institutions in Zimbabwe, involving participant-observation, in-depth interviews and participatory methods. These activities, culminating in a symposium, will iteratively build the proposed framework.

By involving biomedical researchers throughout, my research will be uniquely positioned to open new pathways to influence research, policy and care.