The Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP) is a programme of work focusing on the social dimensions of emergency responses.

Our vision is to encourage emergency responses which are effective, adaptive, contextually informed, sensitive to vulnerabilities and power relations, planned in consultation with affected communities and local institutions, and based on social and interdisciplinary science and evidence. 

We provide evidence on demand, capacity-building, and networking spaces on emergencies that relate to health, conflict or the environment. We focus our efforts on exploring the political economy, community engagement and cultural logics, social difference and vulnerabilities of those emergencies.

SSHAP is a partnership between the Institute of Development Studies, Anthrologica , Gulu University, Le Groupe d’Etudes sur les Conflits et la Sécurité Humaine (GEC-SH), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of Juba, CRCF Senegal, University of Ibadan and the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre. SSHAP is supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Wellcome Trust, with previous funding from UNICEF.

You can browse our collections of resources relating to emergency responses. 

 

Get Involved

The SSHAP Forum is an online discussion group for practitioners, policymakers and researchers that promotes the sharing of social science evidence and perspectives concerning the social dimensions of preparedness and response to disease outbreaks, health emergencies and humanitarian crises. The SSHAP Forum is an online space, hosted on Google Groups, for peers in different geographies and contexts to:

  • share insights from their practice;
  • learn from and give support to one another;
  • and inform and contribute to SSHAP activities and initiatives, for example co-authoring or reviewing briefings, taking part in roundtable events, etc.

Please join the SSHAP Forum by requesting access to the group.

SSHAP provides timely, relevant information that’s useful for a wide range of professions, including practitioners on the ground, policy advisors and media professionals. Our rapid response briefings and infographics are one key method of sharing our insight, analysis and advice. SSHAP partner organisations regularly meet to decide what to work on next, taking into account what we think will be most useful for our audiences. Our decisions are guided by your input, and we encourage you to feed in your ideas using the contact form below.

You could suggest we focus on a particular cross-cutting topic, or a particular context. You can find examples of our rapid response briefings below:

If you’re not sure if your suggestion is appropriate for SSHAP, please feel free to get in touch to discuss it with us using the contact form below.

On our blog, we share interesting commentary that we hope is useful for widening perspectives on social sciences in emergencies. We often share blogs from our partner organisations, but we can also host your blog if you have something interesting and relevant to share with our audiences.

If you have already written and published a blog, we can re-post the blog on our website as long as we have permission to do so. If you have an idea for a new blog that you would like us to post, we encourage you to get in touch with your suggestion using the contact form below.

In our library of resources, we include the publications we produce alongside resources from others. We select resources that help build a picture of the role of social sciences in emergencies, either in general or relating to a particular emergency.

If you know of a resource that would be suited to our library, we encourage you to get in touch with the details of your suggestion using the contact form below. We have no set format or criteria for publication, but we will review material for quality and relevance.

Through our website, Twitter account and newsletter, we share news and events that we think are relevant and timely for those interested in the role of social sciences in emergencies. If you have some news or an event that you would like us to share, please do get in touch with us using the contact form below.

The Fellowship Programme is for future leaders in social science seeking to apply their knowledge to humanitarian emergencies in locally relevant ways. The SSHAP Fellowship Programme plays a key role in helping to realise SSHAP’s work to encourage emergency responses which are effective, adaptive, contextually informed and based on social and interdisciplinary science and evidence.

Launched in February 2021, the programme pairs social scientists with practitioners in the same region to facilitate and encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge exchange. SSHAP Fellows benefit from working closely with leading thinkers and practitioners from within the SSHAP partnership and a tailored professional training programme.

Find out more and engage with the Fellowship content here.

If you have any other ideas for how we can collaborate with you, we encourage you to send us an email using the contact form below.

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    Engage with our curated collections of publications on current and previous emergencies
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