Annie Wilkinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3637952 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annie Wilkinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annie |
| FAMILY NAME | Wilkinson |
| SIGNATURE | WILKINSON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2114-7023 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 174 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Intersectional experiences of non-communicable diseases and health seeking strategies in informal settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone
This paper takes an intersectional approach to explore the burdens of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and their interactions with gendered inequities and poverty, in shaping health seeking practices. The study explores the lived experiences of men and women living with NCDs in three informal settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone. As Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) grapple with increased NCD risk factors, evidence gaps limit understandin…
Pandemic futures, future preparedness
The deliberations for the Pandemic Accord have opened an important moment of reflection on future approaches to pandemic preparedness. The concept had been increasingly prominent in global health discourse for several years before the pandemic and had concretised into a set of standardised mainstream approaches to the prediction of threats. Since 2019, the authors and the wider research team have led a research project on the meanings and practic…
Ebola in the rear-view mirror
This paper examines how past experience and legacies of epidemics shaped Sierra Leone's response to COVID-19 and how these influences evolved over time. COVID-19 unfolded in the wake of the West African Ebola epidemic (2013-2016), a crisis which was unprecedented in scale. Despite differing markedly in both transmission patterns and clinical outcomes, the Sierra Leonean government repeatedly invoked Ebola when responding to COVID-19, framing the …
Pandemic Preparedness for the Real World
The cost of the Covid-19 pandemic remains unknown. Lives directly lost to the disease continue to mount, while related health, livelihood and wellbeing impacts are still being felt, and the wider ramifications across society, politics and the economy are yet to fully materialise. What is known about these costs though, is that they have been unequally distributed both within and between countries. Preparedness plans proved inadequate in many sett…
A Framework for Social Science in Epidemics
In epidemic preparedness and response, it is now commonly accepted that insights from social science disciplines are important in shaping action. Unfortunately, the role of social science is often confined to risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) efforts. In this article, we propose an analytical framework that would allow researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to employ social science insights to enrich their under…
Negotiating Intersecting Precarities
This article shares findings on COVID-19 in Africa across 2020 to examine concepts and practices of epidemic preparedness and response. Amidst uncertainties about the trajectory of COVID-19, the stages of emergency response emerge in practice as interconnected. We illustrate how complex dynamics manifest as diverse actors interpret and modify approaches according to contexts and experiences. We suggest that the concept of "intersecting precaritie…
Rethinking disease preparedness
This paper argues for a rethinking of disease preparedness that puts incertitude and the politics of knowledge at the centre. Through examining the experiences of Ebola, Nipah, cholera and COVID-19 across multiple settings, the limitations of current approaches are highlighted. Conventional approaches assume a controllable, predictable future, which is responded to by a range of standard interventions. Such emergency preparedness planning approac…
Exploring gender, health, and intersectionality in informal settlements in Freetown
This paper applies an intersectional lens to health in informal urban settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We explored how intersecting social characteristics including gender, age, wealth, occupation, and tenant status influence health and well-being outcomes. We found that hazardous environmental conditions, poor waste disposal, and waste burning contribute to health problems at a neighbourhood level. Health-care access was also generally poo…
Local Covid-19 Syndemics and the Need for an Integrated Response
The Covid-19 pandemic is more than a health crisis. It has worse outcomes among individuals with co-morbidities, has exposed fault lines in our societies, and amplified existing inequalities. This article draws on emerging evidence from low- and middle-income contexts to highlight how Covid-19 becomes syndemic when it interacts with local vulnerabilities. A syndemic approach provides a frame for understanding how Covid-19 is amplified when cluste…
Local response in health emergencies
This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and sanitation, which makes standard advice about social distancing and washing hands implausible. There …
Post-pandemic transformations
COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited 'big one': a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 - as a health and development crisis - unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Drawing on over a decade of research on epidemics, we argue that the origins, unfolding and effects of…
Health system innovations
This paper introduces the Thematic Issue on Innovation in Health Systems in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Engaging ‘communities’
The recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa highlights how engaging with the sociocultural dimensions of epidemics is critical to mounting an effective outbreak response. Community engagement was pivotal to ending the epidemic and will be to post-Ebola recovery, health system strengthening and future epidemic preparedness and response. Extensive literatures in the social sciences have emphasized how simple notions of community, which project solidar…
Epistemologies of Ebola
By September 2014, it was clear that conventional approaches to containing the spread of Ebola in West Africa were failing. Public health teams were often met with fear, and efforts to treat patients and curtail population movement frequently backfired. Both governments and international agencies recognized that anthropological expertise was essential if locally acceptable, community-based interventions to interrupt transmission were to be design…
Latin America's Gender Ideology Explosion
Emerging Disease or Emerging Diagnosis
It has become routine to attribute the tragedy of the West African Ebola epidemic to inexperience and lack of knowledge. The states and citizens of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were portrayed as entirely unfamiliar with Ebola and therefore without relevant knowledge. The simplicity of this narrative is disturbed by the experience of Lassa fever, an infectious and deadly viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF), which is endemic in the three countries m…
Zoonotic diseases
Global risks of zoonotic disease are high on policy agendas. Increasingly, Africa is seen as a ‘hotspot’, with likely disease spillovers from animals to humans. This paper explores the social dynamics of disease exposure, demonstrating how risks are not generalised, but are related to occupation, gender, class and other dimensions of social difference. Through case studies of Lassa Fever in Sierra Leone, Henipah virus in Ghana, Rift Valley Fever …
Comparison of social resistance to Ebola response in Sierra Leone and Guinea suggests explanations lie in political configurations not culture
Sierra Leone and Guinea share broadly similar cultural worlds, straddling the societies of the Upper Guinea Coast with Islamic West Africa. There was, however, a notable difference in their reactions to the Ebola epidemic. As the epidemic spread in Guinea, acts of violent or everyday resistance to outbreak control measures repeatedly followed, undermining public health attempts to contain the crisis. In Sierra Leone, defiant resistance was rarer.…
Briefing
Ten months after the first infection, Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, described the Ebola epidemic in West Africa as the ‘most severe acute public health emergency in modern times’. The disaster, she said, represents a ‘crisis for international peace and security’ and threatens the ‘very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries’.1 As of October 2014, the disease had killed 4,951 and in…
Who the Rainbow Tide Leaves Out
The high-profile LGBT rights gains of the last decade remain innaccessible or irrelevant for much of Latin America’s LGBT population
Post-pandemic transformations
COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited 'big one': a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 - as a health and development crisis - unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Drawing on over a decade of research on epidemics, we argue that the origins, unfolding and effects of…
Local response in health emergencies
This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and sanitation, which makes standard advice about social distancing and washing hands implausible. There …
Briefing
Ten months after the first infection, Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, described the Ebola epidemic in West Africa as the ‘most severe acute public health emergency in modern times’. The disaster, she said, represents a ‘crisis for international peace and security’ and threatens the ‘very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries’.1 As of October 2014, the disease had killed 4,951 and in…
Negotiating Intersecting Precarities
This article shares findings on COVID-19 in Africa across 2020 to examine concepts and practices of epidemic preparedness and response. Amidst uncertainties about the trajectory of COVID-19, the stages of emergency response emerge in practice as interconnected. We illustrate how complex dynamics manifest as diverse actors interpret and modify approaches according to contexts and experiences. We suggest that the concept of "intersecting precaritie…
Emerging Disease or Emerging Diagnosis
It has become routine to attribute the tragedy of the West African Ebola epidemic to inexperience and lack of knowledge. The states and citizens of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were portrayed as entirely unfamiliar with Ebola and therefore without relevant knowledge. The simplicity of this narrative is disturbed by the experience of Lassa fever, an infectious and deadly viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF), which is endemic in the three countries m…
Epistemologies of Ebola
By September 2014, it was clear that conventional approaches to containing the spread of Ebola in West Africa were failing. Public health teams were often met with fear, and efforts to treat patients and curtail population movement frequently backfired. Both governments and international agencies recognized that anthropological expertise was essential if locally acceptable, community-based interventions to interrupt transmission were to be design…
Pandemic Preparedness for the Real World
The cost of the Covid-19 pandemic remains unknown. Lives directly lost to the disease continue to mount, while related health, livelihood and wellbeing impacts are still being felt, and the wider ramifications across society, politics and the economy are yet to fully materialise. What is known about these costs though, is that they have been unequally distributed both within and between countries. Preparedness plans proved inadequate in many sett…
Exploring gender, health, and intersectionality in informal settlements in Freetown
This paper applies an intersectional lens to health in informal urban settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We explored how intersecting social characteristics including gender, age, wealth, occupation, and tenant status influence health and well-being outcomes. We found that hazardous environmental conditions, poor waste disposal, and waste burning contribute to health problems at a neighbourhood level. Health-care access was also generally poo…
Who the Rainbow Tide Leaves Out
The high-profile LGBT rights gains of the last decade remain innaccessible or irrelevant for much of Latin America’s LGBT population
Briefing
Ten months after the first infection, Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, described the Ebola epidemic in West Africa as the ‘most severe acute public health emergency in modern times’. The disaster, she said, represents a ‘crisis for international peace and security’ and threatens the ‘very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries’.1 As of October 2014, the disease had killed 4,951 and in…
Zoonotic diseases
Global risks of zoonotic disease are high on policy agendas. Increasingly, Africa is seen as a ‘hotspot’, with likely disease spillovers from animals to humans. This paper explores the social dynamics of disease exposure, demonstrating how risks are not generalised, but are related to occupation, gender, class and other dimensions of social difference. Through case studies of Lassa Fever in Sierra Leone, Henipah virus in Ghana, Rift Valley Fever …
Comparison of social resistance to Ebola response in Sierra Leone and Guinea suggests explanations lie in political configurations not culture
Sierra Leone and Guinea share broadly similar cultural worlds, straddling the societies of the Upper Guinea Coast with Islamic West Africa. There was, however, a notable difference in their reactions to the Ebola epidemic. As the epidemic spread in Guinea, acts of violent or everyday resistance to outbreak control measures repeatedly followed, undermining public health attempts to contain the crisis. In Sierra Leone, defiant resistance was rarer.…
Engaging ‘communities’
The recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa highlights how engaging with the sociocultural dimensions of epidemics is critical to mounting an effective outbreak response. Community engagement was pivotal to ending the epidemic and will be to post-Ebola recovery, health system strengthening and future epidemic preparedness and response. Extensive literatures in the social sciences have emphasized how simple notions of community, which project solidar…
Epistemologies of Ebola
By September 2014, it was clear that conventional approaches to containing the spread of Ebola in West Africa were failing. Public health teams were often met with fear, and efforts to treat patients and curtail population movement frequently backfired. Both governments and international agencies recognized that anthropological expertise was essential if locally acceptable, community-based interventions to interrupt transmission were to be design…
Latin America's Gender Ideology Explosion
Emerging Disease or Emerging Diagnosis
It has become routine to attribute the tragedy of the West African Ebola epidemic to inexperience and lack of knowledge. The states and citizens of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were portrayed as entirely unfamiliar with Ebola and therefore without relevant knowledge. The simplicity of this narrative is disturbed by the experience of Lassa fever, an infectious and deadly viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF), which is endemic in the three countries m…
Health system innovations
This paper introduces the Thematic Issue on Innovation in Health Systems in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Local response in health emergencies
This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and sanitation, which makes standard advice about social distancing and washing hands implausible. There …
Post-pandemic transformations
COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited 'big one': a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 - as a health and development crisis - unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Drawing on over a decade of research on epidemics, we argue that the origins, unfolding and effects of…
Rethinking disease preparedness
This paper argues for a rethinking of disease preparedness that puts incertitude and the politics of knowledge at the centre. Through examining the experiences of Ebola, Nipah, cholera and COVID-19 across multiple settings, the limitations of current approaches are highlighted. Conventional approaches assume a controllable, predictable future, which is responded to by a range of standard interventions. Such emergency preparedness planning approac…
Exploring gender, health, and intersectionality in informal settlements in Freetown
This paper applies an intersectional lens to health in informal urban settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We explored how intersecting social characteristics including gender, age, wealth, occupation, and tenant status influence health and well-being outcomes. We found that hazardous environmental conditions, poor waste disposal, and waste burning contribute to health problems at a neighbourhood level. Health-care access was also generally poo…
Local Covid-19 Syndemics and the Need for an Integrated Response
The Covid-19 pandemic is more than a health crisis. It has worse outcomes among individuals with co-morbidities, has exposed fault lines in our societies, and amplified existing inequalities. This article draws on emerging evidence from low- and middle-income contexts to highlight how Covid-19 becomes syndemic when it interacts with local vulnerabilities. A syndemic approach provides a frame for understanding how Covid-19 is amplified when cluste…
A Framework for Social Science in Epidemics
In epidemic preparedness and response, it is now commonly accepted that insights from social science disciplines are important in shaping action. Unfortunately, the role of social science is often confined to risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) efforts. In this article, we propose an analytical framework that would allow researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to employ social science insights to enrich their under…
Negotiating Intersecting Precarities
This article shares findings on COVID-19 in Africa across 2020 to examine concepts and practices of epidemic preparedness and response. Amidst uncertainties about the trajectory of COVID-19, the stages of emergency response emerge in practice as interconnected. We illustrate how complex dynamics manifest as diverse actors interpret and modify approaches according to contexts and experiences. We suggest that the concept of "intersecting precaritie…
Pandemic Preparedness for the Real World
The cost of the Covid-19 pandemic remains unknown. Lives directly lost to the disease continue to mount, while related health, livelihood and wellbeing impacts are still being felt, and the wider ramifications across society, politics and the economy are yet to fully materialise. What is known about these costs though, is that they have been unequally distributed both within and between countries. Preparedness plans proved inadequate in many sett…
Intersectional experiences of non-communicable diseases and health seeking strategies in informal settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone
This paper takes an intersectional approach to explore the burdens of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and their interactions with gendered inequities and poverty, in shaping health seeking practices. The study explores the lived experiences of men and women living with NCDs in three informal settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone. As Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) grapple with increased NCD risk factors, evidence gaps limit understandin…
Pandemic futures, future preparedness
The deliberations for the Pandemic Accord have opened an important moment of reflection on future approaches to pandemic preparedness. The concept had been increasingly prominent in global health discourse for several years before the pandemic and had concretised into a set of standardised mainstream approaches to the prediction of threats. Since 2019, the authors and the wider research team have led a research project on the meanings and practic…
Ebola in the rear-view mirror
This paper examines how past experience and legacies of epidemics shaped Sierra Leone's response to COVID-19 and how these influences evolved over time. COVID-19 unfolded in the wake of the West African Ebola epidemic (2013-2016), a crisis which was unprecedented in scale. Despite differing markedly in both transmission patterns and clinical outcomes, the Sierra Leonean government repeatedly invoked Ebola when responding to COVID-19, framing the …
Political science (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Medicine (11 works) · Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research (11 works) · Economic growth (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Global Security and Public Health (6 works)