Luisa Enria, PhD

Luisa Enria’s work applies approaches from political anthropology to studying community experiences of epidemic preparedness and response and humanitarian emergency interventions. Luisa is 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. She currently holds a UK Research and Innovation (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, Enria was a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath, where she also held an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Fellowship for a project titled “States of Emergency: Citizenship in Crisis in Sierra Leone.” In 2015-16, Enria worked as a Research Fellow at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) based in Kambia, Northern Sierra Leone, working in the Ebola Vaccine Projects Trials (EBOVAC) and carrying out ethnographic research on community experiences of the Ebola outbreak and its associated response, a project she continues to be involved in. In 2015, she completed a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford, where her 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)

Connect with Luisa on Twitter: @luisaenria

Resources:

Bringing the social into vaccination research: Community-led ethnography and trust-building in immunization programs in Sierra Leone

Trust and transparency in times of crisis: Results from an online survey during the first wave (April 2020) of the COVID-19 epidemic in the UK

Key social science priorities for long-term COVID-19 response