FHS professor Susan Erikson received a substantial grant to study the social, political and ethical implications of the rapid introduction of new smartphone technologies in Sierra Leone’s COVID-19 response.

FHS professor receives grant to study smartphone use in Sierra Leone’s COVID-19 response

March 02, 2021
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FHS professor and medical anthropologist Susan Erikson is on a team that received a substantial grant from the Research Council of Norway to study the social, political and ethical implications of the rapid introduction of new smartphone technologies in COVID-19 responses.

The COVID-19 Emergency Call study, the Smartphone Pandemic: Mobile technologies and data in the COVID-19 response, was initiated at the University of Oslo and is a collaboration between ethnographic and policy research colleagues from Norway, Sierra Leone, the U.K., the U.S., and Myanmar. The project will provide case studies of digital technology use in national health authorities' responses to COVID-19, and shed light on how tech companies’ experimentation with mobile tracking shapes current policy responses transnationally.

Erikson studies health technologies and governance actions that shape global health outcomes. She began her academic research career in rural eastern Sierra Leone after the war, studying how health data was being used in health policy and other sectors. Erikson was in Sierra Leone in 2014 when Ebola broke out, working in the capital city, Freetown, with a team of FHS graduate students.

“Anthropological expertise depends on long-term engagement with communities. It requires speaking the local languages, residing long-term in community, building relationships and working along-side Sierra Leonean experts,” she explains. “My current research on technology builds on my decades-long experience of living in-country and knowing intimately how people really use their phones.”

The COVID-19 pandemic brought attention to Erikson’s 2018 analysis on the use of big data and mobile phones in Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic in which she explains why, despite the hype and false promises made by Harvard computational epidemiologists, tracking sick people by their phones could not work.

“Sierra Leone, which currently has one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 in the world, has used SMS texting to advise its citizens about health protocols. But anthropologists will be the first to tell you that this approach is limited by literacy rates hovering around 45% of the population, which becomes hugely variable once you leave the capital city. Digging in and drilling down, not always scaling up and out, that’s what anthropological knowledge is all about. It’s only with granular information that we can begin to get serious and actually solve the most wicked global health challenges.”

Erikson is pleased that the Research Council of Norway recognizes the value of social science research.  “Anthropology is a deep science. It requires long-term commitments, not only on the part of researchers but also by funders,” she explains. “During the Ebola epidemic, it was the anthropologists who knew that people were getting sick from attending funerals and unprotected homecare practices. Then, as now, it is social scientists who can explain the social and political worlds that produce sickness.”