Chapter 8: Flipping the Panopticon: Liberian Youth Break the Fourth Wall in the Ebola Crisis

Using metaphors of control as apparatus of state power, this chapter examines how government officials, citizens, UNICEF, and youth negotiated power in logistical efforts to contain the spread of the deadly Ebola virus disease in Liberia. Through this ethnographic study, the author demonstrates how youth flipped a moment of heightened surveillance into an opportunity to perform awareness dramas as an early logistical strategy through direct community outreach in the form of street dramas. Young people are cast as agentive in spite of their own perceptions of having marginal social and political standing, gaining local, national and global attention for their impact through the arts.