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Marion W. Dixon, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Sociology
Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Studies
Coordinator of International and Environmental Studies


Contact Information

Education

  • Bachelor of Arts, Political Science, University of Michigan
  • Master of Science, Development Sociology, Cornell University
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Development Sociology, Cornell University

Courses Taught

  • Interdisciplinary Studies Practicum
  • Interdisciplinary Studies Thesis
  • Agriculture and Food Systems
  • Sociological Foundations 
  • World Cultures
  • Power, Politics, and Society

Background

Marion W. Dixon, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Literature, Culture and Society and coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies degree program and the new International and Environmental Studies degree program at Point Park University. She completed her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and studied abroad at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia and the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Following her undergraduate education, she joined the Peace Corps in Morocco. Then, she completed both her master's degree and Ph.D. in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. Prior to joining Point Park, she taught in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC.

Curriculum Vitae 

Research Interests

  • Agriculture 
  • Food 
  • International Development
  • Middle East and North Africa
  • World-Ecology
  • Nature-Society Relations

Selected Publications

  • Dixon, M. W. The Frontiers of Corporate Food in Egypt. Oxford University Press. 2023.
  • 'Eek! What the Chick? Addressing the Issues of Industrial Poultry in Egypt.' Tiny Beam Fund, Inc., Issue Lab (open access repository), 2023.
  • 'Phosphate fock frontiers: Nature, labor, and imperial states, 1870 – WWII,' Critical Historical Studies 8(2): 271-303. 2021.
  • Invited review of Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia, by Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush, Journal of Development Studies. 2021.
  • 'Agrarian Question Revisited: Smallholders and Corporate Food in Egypt,' special issue ‘Food Security and the Contested Visions of Agrarian Change in Africa,' Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 2020.

  • ‘Chemical fertilizer in transformations in world agriculture and the state system, 1870 to the interwar period’. Journal of Agrarian Change 18(4): 768-786, 2018.

  • ‘Riding on Waves of Crises: Finance, Food, and Political Tumult in Egypt’. In Financialisation, Food Systems and Rural Transformation, edited by H. Bjørkhaug, A. Magnan, and G. Lawrence, pp. 135-155. New York: Routledge, 2018.

  • ‘Plastics and Agriculture in the Desert Frontier’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 37(1): 86-102. 2017.

  • ‘Biosecurity and the Multiplication of Crises in the Egyptian Agri-food Industry’. Geoforum 61: 90-100. 2015.

Selected Presentations

  • 'The Egyptian Corporate Agri-food System and the World Food Economy,'  CEDEJ Cairo, Roundtable/Webinar on Hunger for the Desert: Food, Agri-capitalism and the Environment in Egypt, April 18, 2023.
  • ‘Food Crises and Revolt’, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, New York, N.Y. Aug. 10-13, 2019.

  • ‘Chemical Fertilizer in the Making of National Agricultures and National Industries, 1870 – WWII’, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, August 11-14, 2018.

  • The modern world economy: frontiers, ecology, commodities’, International Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, April 4-7, 2018.

  • ‘Land Reclamation and Expanded Commodity Production in the Longue Durée’, Third Annual Conference of the World-Ecology Research Network, Binghamton University, July 21-22, 2017.

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