The Ebola Crisis in Sierra Leone: Mediating Containment and Engagement in Humanitarian Emergencies

This article explores how framings of the 2014�16 outbreak of Ebola as a crisis, its causes, nature and consequences gave rise to two seemingly contradictory types of interventions within affected communities in Sierra Leone: a militarized state of emergency on the one hand, and efforts to foster local engagement and ownership on the other. Teasing out explicitly the underlying logic of these two modes of response, we are able to discern the convergence between containment and engagement approaches that are at the heart of contemporary humanitarianism. Rather than being opposed or contradictory, the article shows how they were mutually constitutive, through negotiations between different ways of knowing and responding to the Ebola crisis. The resulting divisive practices, juxtaposing �Ebola heroes� and �dangerous bodies�, re-ordered the landscapes that individuals had to navigate in order to manage uncertainty. Tracing these logics through to the �subjects� of intervention, the article tells the story of one traditional healer's �epistemic navigations� in his efforts to survive both the epidemic and its response. Bringing these dynamics and their consequences to the fore in the Sierra Leonean case invites broader reflections on a humanitarian assemblage increasingly reliant on the mutual constitution of containment and engagement, security and resilience, in its approach to managing �at risk� populations

Citizens, dependents, sons of the soil

The impact of biomedicine and biomedical technologies on identity and sociality has long been the focus of medical anthropology. In this article we revisit these debates in a discussion of how unprecedented encounters with biomedicine during the West African Ebola outbreak have featured in Sierra Leoneans’ understandings of citizenship and belonging, using the case study of an Ebola vaccine trial taking place in Kambia District (EBOVAC Salone). Analysing our ethnographic material in conversation with a historical analysis of notions of belonging and citizenship, we show how participation in a vaccine trial in a moment of crisis allowed people to tell stories about themselves as political subjects and to situate themselves in a conversation about the nature of citizenship that both pre-dates and post-dates the epidemic

Surveillance on the frontline of the COVID-19 response in Sierra Leone

As a surveillance officer in Northern Sierra Leone, Abass Kamara reflects on the experience of mounting a rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the frontline. In his conversation with Luisa Enria, he emphasises personal apprehensions, the social and political implications of the pandemic on his border District and the deep-rooted challenge of gaining citizens’ trust

Co-Producing Knowledge through Participatory Theatre: Reflections on Ethnography, Empathy and Power

This article is based on methodological reflections from a participatory theatre project with economically marginal youth in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown. It offers empirical considerations on the application of participatory methods in reference to three concerns of feminist research: the situated nature of knowledge; the wish to create non-hierarchical knowledge; and the orientation towards emancipatory action. In discussing the potential for meaningful participation to create inclusive research spaces, the paper suggests the importance of acknowledging the necessarily indeterminate and imperfect nature of our efforts to mitigate power imbalances and the challenge of intersubjective understanding in our research encounters. </jats:p

Qualitative data for states of emergency: citizenship in crisis in Sierra Leone 2017

This dataset relates to an ESRC-funded project entitled State of Emergency: Citizenship in Crisis in Sierra Leone. Through ethnographic research in Freetown and Kambia (Northern Province) this project explored young people's understandings and experiences of citizenship in the aftermath of Ebola, focusing on state-society relations, expectations and the political imagination in/after crisis. The dataset includes redacted personal field notes, information provided to participants and topic guides.Primary data was collected in Freetown and Kambia District, Sierra Leone. The project used ethnographic methods, specifically participatory observation (detailed through field notes) and discussions with young people, elders and officials.Field notes were hand written and kept in a locked cabinet. They were thoroughly redacted for the purposes of archiving.Consent was not granted for sharing interview transcripts and so these are not included in the dataset

Temple Run

Abstract Amongst young people in Freetown, ‘Temple Run’, a mobile phone game that requires the player to run for their life across treacherous obstacles, is used as code for the perilous journey that an increasing number of young Sierra Leoneans made to Europe via Libya. Through ethnographic accounts, the article discusses the role of dreams of migration in Freetown youths’ articulations of a distinctive political imagination through which they at once critique and re-imagine their relation to the state and assert their identity and expectations as Sierra Leonean citizens. These narratives are rooted in everyday experiences of neglect and state violence but also embody a long history in the region of intersections between migration, insecurity, and contestations of power. Exploring migration as discourse, separate from practice, the paper shows how migration imageries become incorporated into expressions of presence rather than simply longings for absence and into normative ideas of citizenship.</jats:p

From Peace-building towards Development: Opportunities and challenges for Sierra Leone’s future

Simone Datzberger (LSE), Viviane Dittrich (LSE) and Luisa Enria (Oxford) review the recent Sierra Leone research workshop that took place at LSE