Luisa Enria

Designation: Associate Professor in Anthropology, // London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Luisa Enria is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Co-PI of the PULSE Project. Her work draws on medical and political anthropology to study how communities experience and engage with humanitarian crises and interventions. Her ethnographic research began in Sierra Leone with a study on post-war political mobilisation of unemployed youth in Freetown, now published as The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State: Youth, Labour and Violence in Sierra Leone (James Currey 2018). During and after the 2014-16 West African Ebola outbreak, she worked as a social scientist on the Ebola vaccine trials in Northern Sierra Leone, exploring participant engagement with novel vaccines and the long-lasting social and political legacies of the epidemic. She has collaborated on several projects on the social dynamics and political economy of vaccination as well as developing a training for citizen ethnographers to study vaccine confidence in their communities. She currently holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship titled: Crisis of Confidence: the Politics of Evidence and (Mis)Trust in Epidemic Preparedness and Response. As part of this project, she co-produced an ethnographic film- Tarma: Communities on the Frontline of Epidemic Response.