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- Convenors:
-
Frederic Le Marcis
(IRD)
Veronica Gomez Temesio (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
- Location:
- JUB-155
- Start time:
- 11 September, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to look at Ebola emergency from four of its caracteristic: Science, Global Health, poscoloniality and the State. What does their articulation produces at different scales and places?
Long Abstract:
Emergency is analysed as a rhetoric characterizing the moral economy of the contemporary (Fassin, Pandolfi 2013). Grounding our reflexion on current Ebola epidemic, we want to re-interrogate emergency focusing on its specificity: the articulation of Science, Global Health, poscoloniality and States. What does this articulation produce with regard to spaces and scales. We propose three questions:
1) Emergency and the experience of citizenship: Ebola has highlighted the (re)configuration of the social contract (what it means to be cared for by the State, or by NGO's). Although Ebola pandemic can be seen as a test for citizenship (Somers 2008), it can be seen as well as a concrete experiment of how people practically belong to the world.
2) Science and Emergency: Ebola epidemic gave rise to mobilization of research teams. They became involved building on their experience gained in other fields. How did they negotiate their experience with emergency? What consequences on their practices? How did science redefined what emergency is? Reacting to emergency imposes itself as a moral duty. Nevertheless the rapidity of the answer has to do with know how. Emergency needs to be thought as preparedness too.
3) Care and Emergency: the question of the quality of care within Ebola Treatment Centres has raised sharp critics (ie: prevention of contagion for the health workers versus quality of care provided to patients). How do precautionary principle and emergency interact? How issues of biosecurity and humanity care do articulate (lakoff 2010)?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sylvain Landry Birane FAYE (UNIVERSITY CHEIKH ANTA DIOP)
Paper short abstract:
By taking up the challenge of a reflective and critical perspective, this paper seeks to examine the issue of confrontation between the methodological requirements of the discipline and the pragmatic ones imposed by the terrain or the "sponsors" of its intervention and adjustments induced.
Paper long abstract:
The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa left its mark on people's minds because of its incidence and lethality, and its occurrence over a long period of time. But what caught the attention of people is also an important mobilization of social science experts in the intervention teams. These actors were mobilized because of difficulties in having interactions between medical teams and populations to meet the community support and mediation demand. This operational request comes in addition to the usual search function. However, conducting research in health emergency poses a set of challenges, given the difficulties related either to the nature of the object under study or to the context of medical, social and emotional risks. Moreover, the immediate application needs of anthropological knowledge require quick response which refers to a short epidemiological time which differs from the long anthropological time.
By taking up the challenge of a reflective and critical perspective, this paper seeks to examine the issue of confrontation between the methodological requirements of the discipline and the pragmatic ones imposed by the terrain or the "sponsors" of its intervention and adjustments induced. To what extent do these conciliations have implications for canonical objects of social science methodology? Under what conditions is it possible to produce a scientific knowledge in a health emergency context? In addition, this paper also discusses the relationships between anthropology and medicine and examines the issue of co-disciplinarity in the field of health emergency.
Veronica Gomez Temesio (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon) Frederic Le Marcis (IRD)
Paper short abstract:
As from the start of the outbreak in Guinea, Ebola Treatment Units appeared as self-evidence. In unpacking the obviousness of the camp model, we want to interrogate its genealogies both within and outside of Ebola history and answer following questions: What are its products? What does it creates?
Paper long abstract:
Ebola treatment units (ETUs) have been at the forefront of the epidemic in West Africa. This "kit" produced by MSF imposed itself over other ways to handle the epidemic. Compared to the HIV approach, the camp marks a return to classical public health approaches to infectious diseases that relies on isolation. The edge of the epidemic being over, it is about time to reflect on the questions raised by camps but which were largely kept quiet because of the emergency context.
ETUs are places where citizens come to experience the "bare life". Inside the camps, they loose freedom over their biological and social life. In this sense, ETUs constitute states of exception where individuals are reduced to contaminated bodies that have to be removed from society. Citizens are also encouraged by massive campaigns to give up "suspect" parents or neighbors to public authorities as a way of "loving" and "protecting" the Nation. Consequently, contamination with Ebola equates with a loss of a "right to have rights" in society. Public efforts to protect the population whilst at the same time, detaining people in exceptional sites of treatment, sheds light on novel conjugations of "biopolitics" and "necropolitics".
Drawing on ethnographic data collected inside Guéckédou and Wonkifong ETUs in Guinea, we want to interrogate the camp model genealogies both within and outside of Ebola history - ETU as state of exception: from the refugee camp to the concentration camp - and answer the following questions: What are ETUs products? What do they create?
Cretin Nathanael (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
The presentation seeks to draw some parallels between the current Ebola response and some elements of the political history in Guinea useful to understand how the intervention has sometimes been avoided, distrusted and even rejected.
Paper long abstract:
Based on a fieldwork conducted between January and March 2015 in Guinea, this presentation aims at understanding the way the recent Ebola virus epidemic interacted with the political field.
As the epidemic fades away, come the national and communal elections. Tensions around their organizations gives space to popular discontents. Both Ebola and Election preparation feeds the popular contestation of the political order.
Both events are inscribed in the long Guinean history of distrust between States (be it colonial or postcolonial) and the population. The perception of the international Ebola response and of the pre-electoral settings should be seen under the light of this history.
We will discuss this building on three month fieldwork carried out in and around the Macenta Red Cross ETU (Forest Guinea)
Anne Menzel (Justus-Liebig-University Gießen)
Paper short abstract:
The paper offers a different kind of Ebola story (to borrow from Caroline Nordstrom’s famous "A Different Kind of War Story") that stresses the continuity of suffering and the recurrence of disappointment in Sierra Leone, rather than adhering to notions of unprecedented emergency.
Paper long abstract:
Based on phone conversations with long-time friends and informants in Sierra Leone through which I have been seeking to follow epidemic and humanitarian processes "on the ground", my paper offers a different kind of Ebola story. More precisely, it will sketch out a narrative that does not adhere to the notions of unprecedented emergency which appear to be typical for medical and humanitarian accounts. Rather than unprecedented emergency, my friends and informants have often stressed the recurrence of disaster in Sierra Leone - war-time violence, enduring poverty and post-war struggles for life-chances and survival and now Ebola − and with it the recurrence of multifaceted disappointments: in oneself, in one's fellow Sierra Leoneans, in the government, and in the "international community". I will use our conversations and combine them with materials from Sierra Leonean newspapers (inasmuch as they are available online) and from my own field research (in 2009, 2013 and early 2014 prior to the official onset of the epidemic) in order to assemble a different kind of Ebola story that seeks to highlight continuity and recurrence rather than exceptionality. Acknowledging experiences of enduring struggle could open perspectives on local perceptions and behaviors that have been depicted as puzzling or even as disturbing and irrational. However, the very idea of suffering as an ongoing process and/or an oft-recurrent experience works against the logics of exceptionality and exceptional action that inform humanitarian action and attract donor and media attention.
Janice Graham (Dalhousie University)
Paper short abstract:
The Ebola emergency opened neoliberal doors of opportunity for fast-tracking development of nascent treatments and vaccines that were lingering in national laboratories and the intellectual property drawers of biotech companies. Health system strengthening will advance via biotechnology assemblages.
Paper long abstract:
WHO's Declaration of a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" (PHEIC) in August 2014 nearly five months after Guinea notified them of an outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD), opened the door for emergency response. Lakoff (2014) has suggested that the techno-political meaning of EVD sparked the change in WHO's response, notably "the extent to which …its capacity to provoke a global health emergency - depended on the condition of the local public health infrastructure". I suggest that the Declaration opened the neoliberal doors of opportunity and incentives for fast-tracking development of a host of nascent treatments and vaccines that were already lingering in the refrigerators of national laboratories and the intellectual property drawers of biotech companies. The EVD emergency may well be a seachange for multilateral recognition of the need for community engaged health system strengthening, but, so too, it will have to incorporate the global biotechnologies assemblage. WHO's aspirations to achieve national core competency for disease surveillance will now need to extend to and engage with communities to meet minimal global standards of detection, communication and response. Engaged support and integration with WHO's Global Vaccine Action Plan will be fundamental to a coordinated essential global disease surveillance and vaccine implementation program. The lack of capacity and capabilities of healthcare workers to respond sufficiently to a crisis is a crisis in and of itself, and the die is cast that the gaming of market failure for treatments and vaccines for emerging and neglected diseases will shape the vehicle of delivery.