Humanitarian assistance is framed around ‘protection’. Deciding whom to protect and against what is not straightforward, particularly during a pandemic. This article critically explores containment and protection by focusing on refugee self-protection in Uganda.
To facilitate reflection on epidemic preparedness and response in Senegal, and the role played by the social sciences in this process, a roundtable event was held in Dakar in December 2023. Read more about the event in this short news item by Khoudia Sow and Mariam Ballo Boyon.
People with disabilities around the world face discrimination in their daily lives, including in their abilities to access public services and infrastructure. But what are the experiences of people with disabilities during disasters and emergencies? Do emergency responses take into account their needs? In this blog, Obindra B. Chand and Pallav Pant look at the current challenges facing people with disabilities during times of crisis in Nepal.
A new report from the Institute of Development Studies, UK, calls on world leaders to look beyond the conventional staples of the public health toolkit as they draw up a new WHO global treaty on pandemics.
Despite more than 25 documented outbreaks of Ebola since 1976, our understanding of the disease is limited, in particular the social, political, ecological, and economic forces that promote (or limit) its spread.In the following study, we seek to provide new ways of understanding the 2013-2016 Ebola pandemic. We use the term, ‘pandemic,’ instead of ‘epidemic,’ so as not to elide the global forces that shape every localized outbreak of infectious disease.
By situating life histories via a biosocial approach, the forces promoting or retarding Ebola transmission come into sharper focus.We conclude that biomedical and culturalist claims of causality have helped obscure the role of human rights failings (colonial legacies, structural adjustment, exploitative mining companies, enabled civil war, rural poverty, and the near absence of quality health care to name but a few) in the genesis of the 2013-16 pandemic. From early 20th century smallpox and influenza outbreaks to 21st century Ebola,
Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) pandemic is having devastating and tragic social, economic, and political impacts. HIV/AIDS is both a health issue and a development problem, with complex links to rural livelihoods, human capacity, and natural resource conservation. As the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa has spread, it appears that increased pressure has been placed on the already dwindling forest resources on which vulnerable populations depend. Evidently, forests and the products that they provide may well decrease the vulnerability of rural people by increasing their resilience to HIV/AIDS. Yet, despite decades of research regarding the impacts of HIV/AIDS on rural livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa, the links between HIV/AIDS, vulnerability, resilience, and wild natural capital has largely gone unexplored. Research on the interactions between the use of forest resources and contemporary epidemics in general, and on the environmental dimensions of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in particular,
This thesis examines the Influenza A/H5N1 virus in action through an ethnographic study focused on the entwined concepts of risk and modernity. The objective is to explain why the response to the virus has been challenged in Indonesia.
Concerned with policy formulation, and everyday practice, the thesis argues that assemblages of historical, political, institutional and knowledge‐power processes create multiple hybrid constructions of risk and modernity, which challenge technical responses based on epistemological positions and institutional arrangements that do not allow for such hybridity.
Examining the political economy of knowledge in responses to the 2009-10 influenza pandemic, this paper argues that globally, and in many individual nations, techno-scientific narratives constructed by bio-medical actor networks failed to correspond with the more variegated narratives of multifarious global publics, and so struggled to recruit support and maintain credibility and authority.With reductive narratives constructed by bio-medical actor networks confounded by the uncertainties intrinsic to the influenza virus, the complexities of the disease in individuals, and compromised by continuing ignorance, political and cultural forces became dominant.Universalistic, one-size-fits-all responses drawn from reductive science are therefore argued to be insufficient, and possibly misguided. Planning and response efforts must consider diverse local settings and concerns. Reductive technical framings emerging from tight, unreflexive actor networks may prevent other options from emerging, and limit response pathways.
Such narrow,technocratic responses are not only at odds with the varied understandings,
