Research Context
As we exit the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers are seeking ways in which to heal broken relations of trust, resulting from high and unequal rates of transmission and mortality, economic deprivation and a sense of political abandonment experienced by some communities.
'Building trust' has been seen by policymakers as central to both encouraging the uptake of COVID-19 vaccinations and encouraging groups who have experienced structural racism, historical exclusion and those who are recent migrants, to seek healthcare in the UK. However, efforts to define trust remain abstract and elusive, eliding the complex forms of intimacy and suspicion that allow us to relate to one another in times of crisis.
This project emerged from two ethnographic projects conducted during COVID-19. The first was Covid & Care, led by Nikita Simpson and Professor Laura Bear, LSE Anthropology. The second was Ethnographies of Disengagement, led by Elizabeth Storer and Iliana Sarafian.
Across UK and EU policymaking about viral containment and vaccine distribution, these research projects revealed the centrality of trust through different phases of pandemic policy. Importantly, too, these projects led the research teams to question the evolution of the concept of trust, as well as the forms of racial and economic disempowerment erased from discourse on trust policy.
Project overview
This research project uses participatory methods to investigate what trust means among Somali and Roma communities living across the Midlands in the UK. Concurrently, it focuses on how policymakers working in these communities understand the concept of trust, and build trust relations through community engagement and service provision.
The team will use innovative, participatory methodologies to investigate both local, cosmological understandings of trust, and to understand what constitutes a trusting relationship with local and national forms of bureaucracy.
Research insights will be provided regarding trust in relation to social cohesion and marginality, as well as to healthcare and vaccine uptake specifically. We hope to amplify the voices of these groups in Covid policymaking processes, and ultimately to improve health equity in a post-pandemic world.
Project objectives
The project seeks to amplify perspectives occluded from national understandings of the COVID-19 pandemic, and of post-pandemic recovery. Across these co-produced interventions, we will be guided by the following aims and objectives:
- to understand how trust is defined (and contested) within community groups with respect to their position in society and their relationship to the healthcare system.
- to understand which forms of authority are considered 'trustworthy' arbiters of information.
- to understand how COVID-19 interventions interface with wider practices of group solidarity, and encounters with local healthcare systems and the state.
- to develop and validate a toolkit of participatory methods through which trust relations might be investigated by community groups and policy makers.
Dr Iliana Sarafian: Principle Investigator
Iliana Sarafian is a postdoctoral Research Officer at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at LSE. Her research is in the fields of minority health and wellbeing, gender, ethnicity and social inequalities.
Her doctoral work focused on the interrelationships of kinship and state in the case of Roma communities in Bulgaria. In 2021 Iliana conducted research on vaccination uptake in Roma communities in Italy and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
She is currently working on ethnographic research among minority communities in the UK and the post-COVID-19 reverberations of inequality. Iliana is interested in participatory research and ethnographic elaborations of trust for impact on health policy.
Dr Nikita Simpson: Principle Investigator
Nikita Simpson is an incoming Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London and a Visiting Fellow at LSE, having completed her doctoral and postdoctoral studies there in 2022.
In 2020, she co-founded the Covid and Care Research Group with Prof. Laura Bear and has since conducted ethnographic research with communities across the UK on the ways in which Covid-19 policy has exacerbated inequalities of race, ethnicity, gender and economic opportunity. The group fed directly into policymaking processes at local authority and national government level, and since 2021 has fed into an EU policy conversation through the PERISCOPE consortium.
Nikita is particularly interested in exploring the psychic and embodied dimensions of trust in Birmingham’s Somali community, alongside her collaborator, Suad Duale.
Dr Elizabeth Storer: Principle Investigator
Elizabeth Storer is a postdoctoral Research Officer at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at LSE. Her research focuses on the social lives of “emergency” health interventions, and has involved ethnographic and participatory work with communities, activists, health workers and state officials across Uganda, Malawi, Italy and the UK.
Through involvement in the Periscope consortium, Elizabeth aims to bring theories from African borderlands to an understanding of the social responses to European and UK pandemic policies.
Milena Wuerth: Researcher
Milena Wuerth holds a BA in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and is currently pursuing a MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Milena also works as a Research Assistant for the King’s College London ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. Her research focuses on the social aspects of mental health and socioeconomic disparities in healthcare.
This research is funded through an LSE RISF grant (108719)