Motile outbreaks: Situating Ebola resurgences in human motilities in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

我们项目的主要目标是通过研究人类运动，探索2021年几内亚和2021年刚果民主共和国埃博拉疫情的复苏。这些死灰复燃是致命传染病爆发的特殊历史中的特殊事件。它们与历史上最大规模的埃博拉疫情有关，即2014年和2016年的西非埃博拉疫情，以及2018年至2020年在刚果民主共和国东部爆发的第十次埃博拉疫情。这些前所未有的疫情在宣布结束几个月甚至几年之后还会再次爆发，这一发现被认为标志着埃博拉研究的一个新范式，在许多其他问题中，该研究一直在努力解决如何追踪与人类和非人类参与者联系在一起的病毒的流动性问题。正如我们的项目所坚持的那样，在埃博拉研究的这一领域，疫情的复苏表明，我们需要开发新的分析方法，提出关于人类流动性的新问题，这些问题在过去的疫情中可能没有被问到，但需要在未来的疫情中进行调查。我们的目标是发展一种流动性方法，从经验和概念上研究埃博拉疫情如何在流动人口中重新爆发。我们将利用移动性的概念来发展一种人类学方法来研究复兴，将人类和病毒的移动性置于对人的移动性能力的分析之中。这种流动性方法有望提供一种坚实和创新的方法，探索如何将流动性、护理和亲属关系的人类学研究结合起来，以探索埃博拉疫情的重新爆发。我们的运动方法强调，我们需要超越对不同类型运动（身体运动、机动运动、虚拟运动等）的分析，以追踪疫情的起源并预测疫情的传播。相反，我们需要探索人们如何在日常生活中利用移动性手段（身体、出租车、互联网等），以了解病毒如何沿着社会、历史和生态定义的轨迹与人类一起传播。更具体地说，我们的目标是探索人们的移动能力，这反映了空间和时间上扩展的关怀和支持网络的功能。我们将探讨导致埃博拉疫情死灰复燃的人员流动如何处于跨越时间和空间连接人们的更广泛的护理和支持网络中。最后，我们的研究项目希望促进对埃博拉病毒复苏生态学的跨学科研究，并为管理未来的流行病提供相关证据。

The main objective of our project is to explore the resurgence of Ebola outbreaks in Guinea in 2021 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2021 by studying human motilities. These resurgences are exceptional events within the exceptional history of deadly infectious disease outbreaks. They are linked to the largest Ebola epidemics in history, namely the West Africa Ebola outbreak from 2014 and 2016 and the tenth Ebola outbreak in the Eastern DRC from 2018-2020. The discovery that these unprecedented outbreaks can resurge months and years after they had been declared over is considered to mark a new paradigm in Ebola research, which amongst many other things has been grappling with the question how to track the mobility of viruses bound up with human and nonhuman actors. In this field of Ebola research, as our project maintains, resurgences show that we need to develop new analytical approaches to generate new questions about the mobility of humans that may have not been asked in past outbreaks but need to be investigated in future outbreaks. We aim to develop a motility approach to study empirically and conceptually how Ebola outbreaks resurge in mobile populations. We will use the concept of motility to develop an anthropological approach to resurgences, which situates the mobility of humans and viruses in the analysis of people’s capacities to be mobile. This motility approach is expected to provide a solid and innovative approach to explore how the anthropological study of mobility, care, and kinship can be brought together to explore the resurgence of Ebola outbreaks. Our motility approach highlights that we need to move beyond the analysis of different types of movement (bodily movement, motorized movement, virtual movement, etc.) to trail the origin of outbreaks and project the spread of an outbreak. Rather we need to explore how people make use of the means of mobility in everyday life (bodies, taxis, internet, etc.) to understand how viruses can travel with humans along socially, historically, and ecologically defined trajectories. More specifically, we aim to explore people’s capacities to be mobile reflects the functioning of spatially and temporally extended networks of care and support. We will explore how human mobilities leading to the resurgence of Ebola outbreaks are situated in the wider networks of care and support connecting people across time and space. Finally, our research project wants to foster transdisciplinary research on the ecologies of Ebola resurgences and produce evidence relevant to the managing of future epidemics.