This collaborative research initiative brings together an international collaboration of academics and practitioners to study humanitarian experiences during the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic and response. Our approach is multidisciplinary and multi-institutional, and it involves numerous researchers from academia, think tanks, and the NGO and international agency sectors. Our focus is on individual experiences within the response, the knowledge economy that surrounded the Ebola response, and how local culture, context, and human capacity factors have impacted the course of the epidemic.
Our goals are threefold:
- To develop a “history of the present” of the 2014-2015 West African Ebola epidemic.
- To build a publicly accessible archive of interview transcripts documenting humanitarian experiences, insights, and lessons learned.
- To link together disparate local, national, and international experiences of the Ebola response in order to capture the diffuse character of intervention.
- To generate recommendations for future global health and humanitarian responses from an array of actors and observers operating across the response.
Interviews are taking place from June 1, 2015 – August 30, 2016.
The Ebola 100 Project is currently interviewing individuals who are or were involved in the West African humanitarian response in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone in any capacity, as well as people who were involved in Ebola response in the US, Spain, Senegal, and Nigeria, and in prevention efforts in neighboring African states, European countries, and in the United States. An historical and ethnographic approach to the Ebola response will be able to inform future global responses to epidemic and pandemic threats, and will inform a growing literature about the West African Ebola outbreak. We also anticipate that the Ebola 100 Project will be able to provide insight into humanitarian, governmental, scientific, and local engagements, interactions, and responses.
The Ebola 100 Project is structured as a flexible, scalable, and decentralized research consortium. The network of anthropologist-volunteers working on this project emerged from the activities of the Ebola Anthropology Initiative, which was founded through the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the International Development Research Centre, as well as partner networks like the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform and the Reseau West-Africain SHS Ebola. Administrative and technical support is provided by the American Anthropological Association and a growing number of local, national, and international partners.
At present, all personnel on the project are volunteers, and we are in a continual process of recruiting partner institutions, Co-PIs, and interviewers, as well as interviewees. Please contact Sharon Abramowitz at [email protected] for further information by April 30, 2015.
NOTE - This is an unpaid position.