Emmanuelle Roth

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Emmanuelle Roth is an anthropologist with a keen interest in health, the environment, and science. She is a postdoctoral fellow in the project “Fragments of the Forest: Hotspots, Disease Ecologies, and the Changing Landscape of Health and the Environment in West Africa” at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

After initially training in humanitarian action, she became involved as a social scientist in outbreaks of Ebola in West Africa. In 2022, she completed her PhD thesis in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge on the practical, epistemological, and ethical labour of sampling animals said to act as reservoirs of Ebola, such as bats, to identify the “origin” of the outbreak. Her postdoctoral research draws on multispecies ethnography and environmental history to resituate such a virus hunt at the crossroads of natural history, conservation science, infectious disease research, and mining interests in Mount Nimba, an Upper Guinea Forest mountain range rich in biodiversity and mined for iron one since the 1960s.

In her work, Emmanuelle has repeatedly encountered rumours and suspicions as a source of insecurity that is generated, reflected on, and manoeuvred around by West African scientists and decision-makers. She is presently working on a book that offers an intimate portrayal of Guinean virus hunters and the economy of secrecy, epistemological creativity, and scientific ethics surrounding the work of producing knowledge about the world’s largest Ebola outbreak to date. One of the book’s arguments is that managing rumors and communicating about risk, far from an ancillary expertise, structure the very content and the objectives of epidemic science.