This seminar shares fieldwork conducted in the Pandemic Preparedness Project, presenting findings related to different meanings and practices of preparedness, and contemporary dynamics related to ‘rethinking’ preparedness. We will give a spotlight to fieldwork in Uganda, where the idea of ‘intersecting precarities’ encapsulates experiences of authoritarian Covid-19 lockdowns, manifesting amidst already uncertain lives.
Several Ugandan researchers are visiting IDS as our Pandemic Preparedness project comes to a close. This seminar shares fieldwork conducted in the project, presenting findings related to different meanings and practices of preparedness at global, regional and local levels. We shall share reflections on the idea of ‘preparedness from below’, complementing this with analysis from research focused on the experiences of regional and global health actors during Covid that have surfaced tensions related to shifting power in pandemics.
Prof Grace Akello will speak to Ugandan national actors’ reflections on the pandemic and the dynamics related to donor funding flows and divergent priorities for intervention. We will give a spotlight to local level ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda with presentations from four Ugandan project researchers. In the Ugandan setting, political dynamics accentuated the repressive nature of government measures to contain viral spread in the Covid pandemic.
Control measures compounded pre-existing uncertainties in health, livelihoods, and citizen–state relations. This occurred in a context where Covid itself had a much less significant immediate health impact than in other countries. Under such circumstances, Covid-19 intensified precarity, both as a state of chronic insecurity and a political process of exclusion that disproportionately erodes conditions of life for those at the margins. People mobilised in resistance and to enable mutual solidarities in response to the intersecting crises of conflict, forced vaccination campaigns, and the threat of other diseases, raising questions about framings of health security in contexts characterised by multiple political, economic and social insecurities.
Greater appreciation of these dynamics, and thus more sensitive approaches attentive to unfolding local experiences, knowledge and priorities is needed for future pandemics.
Speakers
- Grace Akello, Co-Investigator, Pandemic Preparedness Project; University of Gulu, Uganda
- Bob Okello, researcher on the Pandemic Preparedness Project
- Moses Baluku, researcher on the Pandemic Preparedness Project
- Bono Ozunga, researcher on the Pandemic Preparedness Project
- Peter Kermundu, researcher on the Pandemic Preparedness Project
Chairs
- Melissa Leach, IDS Director
- Hayley MacGregor, IDS Research Fellow
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