Anthropology in Action

This special issue of Anthropology in Action presents a collection of articles that reflect on and analyse the role of social science in epidemic response. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep social and economic inequalities within and across countries which produce unequal COVID-19 outcomes. Researchers have long noted the connections between socio-economic inequalities and infections, and there is growing recognition that epidemics are also social and political events (Bardosh et al. 2020). Anthropological and other social science research has contributed to epidemic response, through attention to cultural and politico-economic context, reframing community ‘resistance’, bolstering community engagement in preparedness and response, and informing response activities, including risk communication (Abramowitz 2017; Bardosh et al. 2020). Despite this, much of the work has been ad hoc and not systematically integrated into the systems of epidemic response, with the exception of the Centres d'Analyses des Sciences Sociales (CASS) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This special issue is timely, in that it builds on foundational work in social science and epidemic response, draws on tensions and experience from recent epidemics including COVID-19 and Ebola, and charts a way forward at both a theoretical and a practical level.

In epidemic preparedness and response, it is now commonly accepted that insights from social science disciplines are important in shaping action. Unfortunately, the role of social science is often confined to risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) efforts. In this article, we propose an analytical framework that would allow researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to employ social science insights to enrich their understanding of epidemics and formulate more effective and sustainable responses. The framework goes beyond simply unpacking social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of context; it situates disease itself – as it is shaped by the contexts in which it circulates – and views it in dynamic relation to response. It also explores how different individuals, social groups and institutions shift their knowledge and practices during an epidemic through power-laden processes of dialogue and learning, or even through silencing and side-lining. It is our hope that this framework will enable responders to engage more deeply and systematically with the contexts of emergencies, so as to ensure activities are more adaptive to local dynamics.

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.

This article reflects on the roles anthropologists have played in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, and identifies the challenges – from the methodological to the political – they faced in fulfilling these roles. Drawing on the author's personal and professional experiences in the country, as well as on interviews with other anthropologists, this article identifies three major roles for anthropologists: conducting ethnographic research; bearing witness to the pandemic through first-person accounts; and engaging various publics. All these activities have contributed to a greater recognition of the role of the social sciences in health crises, even as anthropologists struggle to gain the same legitimacy as their clinical and public health counterparts. The article concludes by making recommendations that can better prepare local anthropologists in responding to future health crises.

Around the world, Indigenous groups have been among the communities most severely affected by COVID-19, and the ability of health systems and social policy responses to support Indigenous responses to the pandemic has been affected by challenges of intercultural communication, sometimes compounded by racist and exclusionary social and political attitudes. The Brazilian Amazon has been a particularly extreme case. This article reflects on the experience of a group of Indigenous leaders and non-Indigenous anthropologists working to promote intercultural approaches to epidemic response in the Rio Negro region of Northwestern Amazonia. It brings together findings from in-person fieldwork on Indigenous responses to infectious disease outbreaks that affected the region before the COVID-19 pandemic and from remote research on COVID-19 response conducted in 2020 and 2021.

Whilst men and boys account for more COVID-19 cases and deaths, the secondary impacts of the outbreak on women and girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are cross-cutting and far-reaching. School closures put girls at increased risk of adolescent pregnancy, sexual violence and early marriage; more women working in the informal sector have lost jobs and been affected by closures of markets and borders; and frequent restrictions on sexual and reproductive healthcare have impacted access to services for women. Lessons learnt from previous health crises can help to highlight the extent of these issues. However, a lack of sex disaggregated data around COVID-19 morbidity and mortality in the DRC means that it is impossible to fully measure and understand the impact of the outbreak on women and girls or develop and implement appropriate interventions. This article presents a meta-synthesis of existing and ongoing analyses to highlight the broader impacts of COVID-19 on women and girls in the country.

The complex and evolving nature of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic poses significant challenges to national and international emergency preparedness and response. Governments must navigate streams of emerging data in real time, synthesising knowledge from diverse sources to inform policy. The UK government drew on experiences from earlier pandemics to bridge perceived gaps between social science research and policy through the secondment of early-career academics as embedded scientists. In this article, we present comparative ethnographic data describing embedded social scientists’ contributions to UK COVID-19 preparedness and response. We find that the liminal position, loose identities, and high degree of autonomy of embedded scientists allowed these individuals to navigate multiple networks to strengthen and legitimise the role of social science within policy debates.