Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses Spring Seminar Series

Event time: 
Thursday, March 30, 2017 - 12:00pm
Location: 
Rosenkranz Hall (RKZ), Room 102 See map
115 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Kristen McLean, MPH, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Yale University

“Humanitarian Experiences and Everyday Life during the West African Ebola Outbreak”

Ms. McLean will present preliminary findings from a recent study called the Ebola 100 Project, a qualitative study of humanitarian experiences during the 2014-2015 West African Ebola outbreak that aims to better understand individual experiences within the response, the knowledge economy surrounding the response, and how local culture, context, and human capacity factors impacted the course of the epidemic. For this presentation, she will focus specifically on the role of humanitarian responders (both national and international) who worked in Sierra Leone treating pregnant and postnatal women, a particularly high-risk group during the outbreak. She will also present findings relevant to her dissertation work on mental health and family wellbeing, which details how the Ebola outbreak impacted daily life and care practices within families and local communities.