Organizing for Resilience: Mobilization by Sierra Leonean Diaspora Communities in Response to the 2014-2015 Ebola Crisis
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Organizing for Resilience: Mobilization by Sierra Leonean Diaspora Communities in Response to the 2014-2015 Ebola Crisis The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Manning, Ryann. 2017. Organizing for Resilience: Mobilization by Sierra Leonean Diaspora Communities in Response to the 2014-2015 Ebola Crisis. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42061468 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Organizing for Resilience: Mobilization by Sierra Leonean Diaspora Communities in Response to the 2014-2015 Ebola Crisis A dissertation presented by Ryann Manning to The Committee for the Ph.D. in Business Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Organizational Behavior Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2017 © 2017 Ryann Manning All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisors: Author: Professor Michele Lamont (co-chair) Ryann Manning Kathleen McGinn (co-chair) Organizing for Resilience: Mobilization by Sierra Leonean Diaspora Communities in Response to the 2014-2015 Ebola Crisis ABSTRACT The question of how social groups prepare for and respond to disasters has long been of interest to sociologists and organizational scholars. Although a catastrophe like the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak is a rare event, we face crises and challenges every day that require us to organize for resilience: to find creative ways to unearth and repurpose latent resources in order to adapt and even prosper in the face of tumult, trauma, or transformation. In this dissertation, I examine mobilization by members of Sierra Leone’s global diaspora communities to respond to the Ebola outbreak in their country of origin. Using abductive analytic techniques, I combine retrospective interviews with real-time data from diaspora organizations, online public conversations, and my own participation in the response to Ebola. I use this extreme case to ask more general organizational and sociological questions about disaster response and resilience, transnational organizing, organizing in and through virtual spaces, and the role of emotions in social mobilization. I find that despite occupying a liminal position from which they could have minimized their exposure to the Ebola outbreak, many members of the diaspora instead formed emergent response groups and worked with established organizations to help fight Ebola. These diaspora activists and organizations pursued a diverse array of actions intended to help stop the spread of Ebola, mitigate its negative effects, and contribute to long-term recovery and rebuilding. In Chapter Two, I show that resilient organizing by members of the diaspora involved identifying and leveraging resources across boundaries of organization, sector, expertise, geographic distance, national identity, and religion. This flexible approach made possible the creative location, activation, combination, and recombination of iii latent resources required for resilience. In Chapter Three, I explore the emotional dynamics of social mobilization, and I find that combinations of emotions, which I call emotional chords, played a critical role in convincing individuals to take action. Once involved in the response to Ebola, diaspora activists and organizations engaged in a process of emotional modulation, by which they used meaningful cultural objects to collaboratively shape their own and others’ emotions in order to solve practical problems and facilitate further mobilization. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Page vi Chapter 1 Introduction Page 1 Chapter 2 All Hands are Needed: Resilient Organizing by Diaspora Communities Page 24 in Response to the West African Ebola Outbreak Chapter 3 This Smile Brightens Up Our Hearts: Emotional Modulation Page 79 and Social Mobilization During the West African Ebola Outbreak Chapter 4 General Discussion and Conclusion Page 130 References Page 138 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am first and foremost indebted to many members of the Sierra Leonean diaspora, without whom this project literally would not exist. Una kushe. Thank you for your openness and generosity, and for trusting me to tell your stories. I hope I have done them justice, and my sincere apologies for any mistakes or misunderstandings that remain. I am tremendously fortunate to have had great mentors and classmates at the Harvard University Sociology Department and Harvard Business School. I am particularly grateful for my powerhouse dissertation committee: Michele Lamont, Kathleen McGinn, Julie Battilana, and Jocelyn Viterna. Your guidance, feedback, and support made this dissertation possible. The Harvard Business School doctoral programs not only supported my research financially, but made it possible for me to take a leave of absence to work on the Ebola response in Sierra Leone. Their wonderful staff provided help and encouragement along the way. Hunter Snyder contributed research assistance on this project, and many friendly readers and workshop participants offered valuable feedback on early versions of these chapters. In the eleven years since I first began working in Sierra Leone, there have been countless people who helped me learn or understand something crucial about the country. I cannot possibly mention them all, but I have tried to take their lessons to heart. I owe a personal thanks to Michael Woolcock and Yongmei Zhou, who helped bring me to Freetown in 2006, and then helped me find my way to a PhD program years later. To the Welbodi Partnership team: it has been a long road but one well worth travelling. I could not have chosen better companions. Thank you for your friendship, commitment, and expertise. To Mariposa Café in Cambridge, where I wrote much of this dissertation and also met my husband: thank you for the sustenance and good company. To my parents and siblings: you have always supported my decisions, even when they worried you. I am who I am because of you. Finally, to my partner (and patient copy-editor) Keith Burrows: you came into my life just as the Ebola outbreak emerged in West Africa, and your love helped sustain me through those difficult months. I cannot thank you enough. vi CHAPTER ONE Introduction “The diaspora is Salone’s biggest single investment… We are the reserve team, we are the reinforcement, the skills, some of the finance, the passion, the drive, the exposure.” Sierra Leonean living in the UK, YouTube, Sept 2014 “I am pleading to… Sierra Leonean health workers, those that are overseas… pleading to them for them to come on board… Rather than that, this country will be no more.” Sierra Leonean nurse in Sierra Leone, recruitment video, Oct 2014 Ebola appeared out of nowhere in March 2014 in the Mano River region of West Africa. As the rainy season approached—a season of torrential downpours and widespread hunger—this deadly virus, new to the region, spread from a Guinean village nestled near the borders of Sierra Leone and Liberia to the capital cities of all three countries. Just three months later, at the beginning of June 2014, the case count had already surpassed that of the largest previous Ebola outbreak, the 2000-2001 outbreak in Uganda that infected 425 people (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2016a, 2016c). In the interconnected rural and urban communities of the Mano River countries, Ebola continued to spread rapidly, and a few weeks later, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) declared the outbreak “out of control” (Hofman and Au 2017:xv). For many people in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, the incursion of Ebola carried echoes of invading armies and violent conflicts waged across the region in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. As one member of Sierra Leone’s diaspora wrote in August 2014, the Guinean village where the virus first emerged (Guéckédou, shown in the maps in Figure 1.1 and 1.2), was “a staging-post for fighting in both Liberia and Sierra Leone’s civil wars.” He continued: “With an eye for irony and historical symbolism, Ebola first attacked patients in Sierra Leone’s border area of Kailahun District, the very same area that first bore the brunt of the civil war in 1991. In 2014, as in 1991, an apparently remote, disinterested government was slow to react” (Chikezie 2014). 1 Figure 1.1 and 1.2: The Mano River Region of West Africa Source: Google Maps 2017 2 Tragically, the Sierra Leonean government was not alone in their delayed response to Ebola; nearly all governmental and major nongovernmental organizations initially underestimated and were slow to react to the threat posed by Ebola (Moon et al. 2015). Notable exceptions, including MSF and frontline healthcare workers in affected areas, struggled for months to sound the alarm and mobilize the resources they needed to manage a rapidly worsening situation. It was not until late July and early August that most people outside of the areas directly hit by Ebola really started paying attention, and several months more before the response began to reach a significant scale, as shown in the timeline in Table 1.1. Meanwhile, cases continued to rise, as shown in Figure 1.3. Eventually, assistance began to trickle and then pour into the region, and the response to Ebola grew into a massive local, regional, and international effort involving hundreds of governmental, humanitarian, civil society, and private sector organizations. This dissertation examines one small piece of that massive mobilization against Ebola: the response by Sierra Leone’s global diaspora. There has been an explosion of research on the Ebola outbreak, but with few exceptions (most notably, DEMAC 2016) this work has largely overlooked the role played by people who identify as Sierra Leonean and yet live outside of Sierra Leone.