Dr Luisa Enria
DPhil
Assistant Professor
LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom
My work applies approaches from political anthropology to studying community experiences of epidemic preparedness and response and humanitarian emergency interventions. I am also interested in the integration of social science perspectives in biomedical interventions and scientific research, and in particular the tensions and possibilities of interdisciplinary collaborations. I currently hold a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for a project titled "Crisis of Confidence: the Politics of Evidence and (Mis)Trust in Epidemic Preparedness and Response".
From 2016-20 I was a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath, where I also held an ESRC Fellowship for a project titled 'States of Emergency: Citizenship in Crisis in Sierra Leone'. In 2015-16 I worked as a Research Fellow at LSHTM based in Kambia, Northern Sierra Leone, working in the Ebola Vaccine Trials (EBOVAC) and carrying out ethnographic research on community experiences of the Ebola outbreak and its associated response, a project I continue to be involved in. In 2015 I completed a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford, where my thesis explored the relationship between unemployment and political violence in post-war Sierra Leone, based on field research with young men and women in Freetown. This is now published as a book by James Currey titled "The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State: Youth, Labour and Violence in Sierra Leone " (2018)
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
I teach on the Principles of Social Research, Conflict & Health and Medical Anthropology Modules
I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students
Research
My current research projects include
- UKRI FLF: exploring the everday negotiations over evidence and between types of knowledge and disciplines across the different spaces that make up epidemic preparedness and response, from global policy-making to field interventions.
- EBOVAC: I support the social science research component of the Ebola vaccine trials taking place in Kambia, Sierra Leone. Our research includes community experiences and perspectives of the trial, community-based epidemic preparedness and legacies of biomedical research
- AVID: I lead the Sierra Leone country case study for the Anthropology of Vaccine Deployment, focusing on the political economy of vaccine deployment and epidemic preparedness at District and National Level
- CHW-led research: I am the research lead on two connected projects to train Community Health Workers in Sierra Leone in social science methods to carry out research in their communities on vaccine hesitancy and more recently experiences of COVID-19 and associated response measures
- COVID-19 perception surveys: I am involved in a UK-based survey on experiences of the pandemic, and an adaptation of the survey for the Sierra Leonean context
- COVID-19 in Palestine: ELRHA-funded project on pandemic response measures in Gaza