Paper short abstract:

This paper draws from experiences working for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in a number of countries, and during the course of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, to illuminate the fraught and contested application of anthropological approaches in medical humanitarian practice.

Paper long abstract:

The ascendency of an anthropology for medical humanitarian action is now regularly charted in relation to the 2013-2016 “West African” Ebola outbreak. The visibility of a particular brand of applied anthropology during the course of this outbreak lends credence to the suggestion that this period marked a turning point for the discipline, with the widespread legitimation of anthropological insights by historically quantitatively driven global public health and humanitarian communities of practice.

What this narrative serves to overlook are the multitude of recorded filovirus outbreaks that preceded 2013, a long history of outbreaks attributable to other pathogens, such as HIV, and other non-pathogenic health emergencies. Abstracting anthropology in health emergencies from this longer history reinforces two implicit assumptions. The first is to imply that there was a remarkable novelty to the combination of virus, context and human behaviour in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia that necessitated a uniquely comprehensive engagement from anthropologists. The second assumption is to present the application of anthropology in health emergencies as a contemporary phenomenon, for which advances have seemingly occurred rapidly with uncomplicated institutional and sectoral uptake and integration.

This paper will explore some of the institutional cultures and practices that hinder the more comprehensive application of anthropological insights to humanitarian response. This paper will further argue that the oppositional nature of anthropological values and approaches to those embedded in mainstream humanitarian praxis requires that “insider” anthropologists adopt a more productively disruptive role in relation to their medical and operational counterparts.

Paper short abstract:

This communication explores the practice of anthropology during the 2021 Ebola outbreak in Guinea and how anthropology in public health emergencies can be turned into a mere professional expertise of communication, far from being a social science discipline producing knowledge on human societies.

Paper long abstract:

As Ebola re-emerged in Guinea in February 2021, a team of anthropologists, including myself, was sent on field to collaborate with the Response. If ethnography allowed to obtain essential data and supported collaboration with local populations, it appeared clearly that anthropologists were considered as “augmented” mediators by the Response, ethnography being conceived as an advanced communication skill. Our presence as ‘natural communicators with the communities’ justified the lack of dialogue and consideration between the Response and local actors. Thus, far from questioning the way local communities were treated during the epidemics, anthropology was being waved as a white flag of “human-focus” community approach by the Response, without any real consideration for the knowledge it produced – becoming a communication tool for crisis management. Stuck in an uncomfortable in-between, anthropologists associated with the Response – neither fully anthropologists nor fully interveners – had to navigate between these different and sometimes opposed identities. Practical and ethical questions arose from the disjunction between the emergency intervention requirements – short-term punctual intervention including active participation and identification of Ebola cases – and the ‘classical’ anthropological methodology – long-term fieldwork with participant observation, informed consent and anonymity of informants. Relations with informants were also rendered difficult by this in-between position. Drawing on the work of Olivier de Sardan, Price, Gruénais, Fassin, Becker et al., Fluehr-Lobban, Bell, and others, this communication analyses how anthropology is institutionalized – and sometimes instrumentalized – during public health emergencies, focusing on the experience of 2021 Ebola resurgence in Guinea.

Paper short abstract:

Covid-19 forced us to be innovative in our fieldwork approach. As anthropologists we practised ‘online ethnography’ and followed the global conversation on Twitter to discover disease narratives on topics such as ‘one size fits all’ pandemic responses and narratives related to ‘Disease X’ in Africa.

Paper long abstract:

As members of the Pandemic Preparedness Project, a social science investigation that focuses on tackling disease threats in Africa, we were already examining social discourse about pandemics when Covid-19 struck. The emergence of this public health threat meant that we were now practicing anthropology in the midst of a health emergency. As a team used to conducting in-person fieldwork, we pivoted to ‘online ethnography’.

Technology has been key to our approach; Covid-19 is the first pandemic in which digital technology and social media are being used on a massive scale to keep people safe, informed, productive and connected. These innovations have allowed us to continue conducting anthropological fieldwork on the social responses to infectious disease and provided a new terrain for analysis. While online technology brings people together and educates, it also amplifies misinformation and disinformation that undermines the global response and jeopardizes pandemic control measures.

We conducted research using online ethnography, including social media listening and online searches on two different topics: 1) the mobilization of WHO’s concept of ‘Disease X’ online before and during Covid-19; and 2) the circulation of online narratives about unequal outcomes produced by ‘one-size-fits all’ Covid-19 response and lockdowns in Africa. We identified narratives that demonstrate divergent understandings of illness and health policy, with consequences for disease eradication and impacts on livelihoods, health and poverty. In this presentation, we overview the findings from these studies and share reflections about the challenges and advantages of ‘online ethnography’ during a pandemic.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper we argue that a key avenue for an effective integration of anthropological insights into existing epidemic response structures is to create interdisciplinary communities of practice that link anthropologists and other social scientists and epidemic responders.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we argue that a key avenue for an effective integration of anthropological insights into existing epidemic response structures is to create interdisciplinary communities of practice that link anthropologists and other social scientists and epidemic responders. Using the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP) fellowship programme as a case study, we explore the potential impacts of supporting academics, humanitarian practitioners and policymakers to increase competencies and gain additional experience in sourcing, generating and applying social science research in real-time during crises. The fellowship programme has run twice in 2021, hosting a total of 20 fellows (half of them social scientists, half of them practitioners) from West Africa, East and Southern Africa, South Asia, Latin America and Caribbean and Pacific. The main tenets of the fellowship are (i) building capacity in operationalising anthropological and social science evidence- both from the side of anthropologist to generate operationally relevant intelligence and from the side of practitioners be able to incorporate more holistic interventions (ii) expanding dialogues between anthropologists and practitioners and developing networks, (iii) building epidemic preparedness.

The question we aim to answer in this paper is whether the creation of these interdisciplinary communities of practice can led to increased uptake of anthropological intelligence, a greater use of anthropological approaches in epidemic response, and a greater capacity of social scientists to produce operationally relevant data. In turn these networks of social scientists and epidemic response practitioners would be able to be with the ‘finger on the pulse’ at a local level, highlighting emerging diseases and problems related to context-blind interventions. Thus, these communities of practice fostered by these fellowships would contribute to achieving effective context- adapted epidemic responses.