Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on research in Sierra Leone, this paper follows the epistemic navigations of an epidemiologist, a traditional healer and an anthropologist as they attempt to curate knowledge about communities for humanitarian health response mechanisms.

Paper Abstract:

Humanitarian health organisations are increasingly concerned with the role of ‘communities’ in responding to epidemics. Communities are ‘where epidemics begin and end’, and as such they are portrayed in dualistic ways, through narratives or risk and resistance on the one hand and as potential partners and repositories of information useful to guide a response on the other. New methods such as community-based surveillance or the inclusion of the social sciences in disease control toolkits are heralded as opportunities to sharpen epidemic ‘intelligence’. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork across different outbreaks in Sierra Leone, this paper explores how people navigate the knowledge economies generated by health emergencies. It follows the experiences of three people in their attempts to (re)position themselves in relation to outbreak response mechanisms: an epidemiologist, a traditional healer and the author, an anthropologist. The paper traces their individual epistemic navigations through their efforts to curate knowledge about communities for the response, in the form of daily situation reports, social science expertise and the performance of ‘community knowledge’. In this process, it also pays attention to the acts of concealment and contestations that lie beneath the production of official epidemic knowledge. Finally, by reflecting on encounters between our three protagonists, the paper also sheds light on the everyday negotiations between ways of knowing the world that are at the heart of crisis management in practice.