Race and the spatialisation of risk during the 2013–2016 West African Ebola epidemic

Hirsch, Lioba

doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2020.102499

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Hirsch (2021) highlights that historically informed processes may also influence the development of certain types of risks and vulnerabilities associated with the EVD response itself. The most prominent example of this concerns how the long history of colonialism perpetuated racial inequalities in ways that impacted negatively on local people in healthcare settings during the response.…”

Section: Discussion: Situating Evd Vulnerability In Informal Settleme...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, a scenario developed in which, although it was the case that international and local healthcare workers were similarly exposed to the risk of EVD infection, the risk of death was greater among locals. For Hirsch (2021), this situation illustrates how places need to be understood as spaces that are shaped by past anti‐black violence in the form of enslavement, colonialism, and racism. In particular, the situation illustrates how racism translated into the inability of black people to participate in placemaking, rendering them more vulnerable.…”

Section: Discussion: Situating Evd Vulnerability In Informal Settleme...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ebola, informal settlements, and the role of place in infectious disease vulnerability: evidence from the 2014–16 outbreak in urban Sierra Leone

et al. 2023

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Studies of vulnerability often focus on the differential susceptibility of marginalised groups to the effects of disaster. This paper considers how vulnerability is also associated with the characteristics of place, especially the social setting of the informal settlement. In this light, it assesses specifically how cultural, historical, and political economic forces resulted in increased vulnerability to Ebola virus disease (EVD) within informal settlements in Sierra Leone during the epidemic of 2014-16. Key informant and community member interviews and focus-group discussions in two communities revealed that increased vulnerability to EVD could, at least in part, be attributed to a set of place-based social factors pertaining to 'community beliefs and practices' (importance of family ties, funeral rites, traditional healing) and 'structural poverty and low socioeconomic status' (poor healthcare provision, mobility patterns, overcrowding). Together, these different factors demonstrate how multiple and intersecting vulnerabilities contribute to the spatial production of disease risk.

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Section: Discussion: Situating Evd Vulnerability In Informal Settleme...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussion: Situating Evd Vulnerability In Informal Settleme...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ebola, informal settlements, and the role of place in infectious disease vulnerability: evidence from the 2014–16 outbreak in urban Sierra Leone

et al. 2023

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“…Experiences from West Africa therefore contributed to the field of the anthropology of epidemics (Kelly et al 2019) but also to studies of humanitarianism and global health, exploring care infrastructures (Abdullah and Kamara 2017;Gomez-Temesio 2018;Park and Umlauf 2014), humanitarian and biomedical assemblages (Alenichev and Nguyen 2019;Benton 2017b;Hofman and Au 2017;Ryan et al 2019;Tengbeh et al 2018), the nuances of power, authority and citizenship in times of crisis (Enria 2020;Enria and Lees 2018;Parker et al 2019a;Shepler 2017), and the racialised dimensions of risk distribution (Hirsch 2021) and humanitarian structures (Benton 2014).…”

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confidence: 99%

Negotiating the Role of Anthropological Evidence in Medical Research during Health Emergencies

Enria

Lees

2022

Anthropology in Action

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The 2014–2016 West African Ebola outbreak is often cited as a watershed moment for the social science of epidemics. Anthropologists played a key role in clarifying the social, economic and political dimensions of the epidemic, highlighting both how outbreak control measures were disrupting social practices and how they could be adapted to reflect local realities and experiences. Whilst undoubtedly significant, this narrative of anthropology’s successful integration risks obscuring the fraught position of the anthropologist within the Ebola response. Taking debates about public anthropology and the balance of action and critique as a starting point, we offer reflexive considerations from our work in the Ebola vaccine trials in Sierra Leone. We look at the involvement of social scientists in HIV clinical trials, which led to the inclusion of a social science component in the Ebola trials, through to the everyday discussions on how to integrate ethnographic insights into the running of operations. In so doing, we highlight the importance of foregrounding participants’ and communities’ voices, and confront what gets lost in translation. Keeping this tension in focus, we consider the consequences of this complex position for the possibility of a ‘critically embedded’ anthropology of clinical research in health emergencies.

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“…While the literature on humanitarian aid mainly explores the differential value of life between aid workers and aid beneficiaries (Fassin 2007(Fassin , 2009(Fassin , 2018Packard 2016;Redfield 2013), little has been written on local aid workers and even less on the role of race (Benton 2016a(Benton , 2016b. This article, among others (Hirsch 2019(Hirsch , 2021Issoufou 2018;Kingori and McGowan 2016), addresses this gap, shedding light on the enrolment of local workers in Guinea during the Ebola outbreak, the increased risk to which they were exposed, and their limited access to humanitarian media campaigns (see Photo 3).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Yet Wonkifong constituted a peculiar anti-black world in that, unlike most of the Ebola infrastructures around the Manor River region (Hirsch 2019(Hirsch , 2021, there were almost no white or Western personnel working there. Its employees were mainly black people coming from Africa and Cuba.…”

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confidence: 99%

Homage to Ebola Fighters: Black Labor and Humanitarian Media Campaigns

Gomez‐Temesio

2022

Med Anthropol Q

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During the Ebola outbreak that hit Guinea in 2014, most of the people employed at the Wonkifong Ebola treatment unit were from Africa or Cuba. Despite the recruitment of black personnel, the unit exposes how the humanitarian infrastructure exploited Guinean workers as if their lives were less vulnerable than those of the foreign personnel. The Africanization of aid reveals a post‐colonial segregation at the intersection of race, class, and locality. The article follows Guinean workers in the quarantine unit, as well as their enrolment in media campaigns. Their experience illuminates a triage at the core of Global Health according to which not only were local workers treated as expendable lives, but their stories were silenced. Yet how did Guinean workers inhabit this anti‐black world? The article unfolds the journey of workers during the outbreak and three years later, exploring the strategies they used to produce their own narratives through personal archives. [humanitarian aid, humanitarian media campaigns, race, Ebola, archives]

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Race and the spatialisation of risk during the 2013–2016 West African Ebola epidemic

Abstract: logics-of-ebola-response-in-west-africa.html/ 9. Bledsoe, A.(2019). The primacy of anti-blackness. Area.

Cited by 8 publications

References 22 publications

Ebola, informal settlements, and the role of place in infectious disease vulnerability: evidence from the 2014–16 outbreak in urban Sierra Leone

Ebola, informal settlements, and the role of place in infectious disease vulnerability: evidence from the 2014–16 outbreak in urban Sierra Leone

Negotiating the Role of Anthropological Evidence in Medical Research during Health Emergencies

Homage to Ebola Fighters: Black Labor and Humanitarian Media Campaigns

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