Analyze

How does visualizing allows us to set the parameters to make the future vision a reality?

As a researcher, I’m interested in the political, ecological, and cultural debates around mosquito-borne diseases and the solutions proposed to mitigate them.

When we received the task, my first impulse was to investigate about the contemporary effects of anthropogenic climate change in mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans. But I was afraid to make the same mistake that I did in my PhD research. I wrote my PhD proposal while based in the US, more specifically in New England, during the Zika epidemic, and proposed to understand how scientists were studying ecological climate change and mosquitoes in Brazil. However, once I arrived in the country the political climate was a much more pressing issue, with the dismantling of health and scientific institutions.

Thus, after our meeting yesterday, and Jason Ludwig’s reminder that the theme of our Field Campus is the plantation, I decided to focus on how it related to mosquitoes in New Orleans.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito and the yellow fever virus it can transmit are imbricated in the violent histories of settler-colonialism and slavery that define the plantation economy. The mosquito and the virus arrived in the Americas in the same ships that brought enslaved peoples from Africa. The city of New Orleans had its first yellow fever epidemic in 1796, with frequent epidemics happening between 1817 and 1905. What caused New Orleans to be the “City of the Dead,” as Kristin Gupta has indicated, was yellow fever. However, as historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby points out, the slave trade cannot explain alone the spread and persistance of the disease in the region: "Alterations to the landscape, combined with demographic changes resulting from the rise of sugar production, slavery, and urban growth all contributed to the region’s development as a yellow fever zone." For example, sugar cultivation created ideal conditions for mosquito proliferation because of the extensive landscape alteration and ecological instabilities, including heavy deforestation and the construction of drainage ditches and canals.

Historian Kathryn Olivarius examines how for whites "acclimatization" to the disease played a role in hierarchies with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people and how for black enslaved people "who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery."

As I continue to think through these topics, I wonder how both the historical materialities of the plantation and the contemporary anthropogenic changes might be influencing mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans nowadays? And more, how the regions’ histories of race and class might still be shaping the effects of these diseases and how debates about them are framed?

1. “Chronic disaster syndrome” thus refers in this analysis to the cluster of trauma-and posttrauma-related phenomena that are at once individual, social, and political and that are associated with disaster as simultaneously causative and experiential of a chronic condition of distress in relation to displacement.

2. Most efforts to rebuild health care facilities focused on emergency care, routine care, and surgical services rather than psychiatry.

3. For many people, the idea that they had to stay in a state of heightened response to the pending “crisis”—a state they had already been in for over two years—produced huge anxiety and exhaustion.

4. Instead, the notion that New Orleanians themselves were a threat to public or national security circulated and became a rationale for the efforts the government did take to effect change in New Orleans. This change, in effect, targeted the poor. The poor, it seems, were to be evicted from New Orleans as a way to “clean up” the city and help it recover once and for all.

1. Arguably, the new Ukrainian accounting of the Cherobyl unknown was part and parcel of the government's strategies for "knowledge-based" governance and social mobilization. In 1991 and in its first set of laws, the new parliament denounced the Soviet management of Chemobyl as "an act of genocide."

2. On the one hand, the Ukrainian government rejected Western neoliberal prescriptions to downsize its social welfare domain; on the other hand, it presented itself as informed by the principles of a moder risk society. On the one hand, these Chernobyl laws allowed for unprecedented civic organizing; on the other hand, they became distinct venues of corruption through which informal practices of providing or selling access to state privileges and protections (blat) expanded.

3. Government-operated radiation research clinics and non- governmental organizations mediate an informal economy of illness and claims to a "biological citizenship"-a demand for, but limited access to, a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that recognize injury and compensate for it.

Overall the film included the most important perspectives; doctors, patients, and the family of the patients. I think the perspective of nurses or caregivers that aren't family would've been helpful though, as they would care for the patient most often and also feel grief from losing them. 

The author of the article seemed to conduct their research from NPR reporters in Haiti, interviews with various organizations (U.N, Center for Economic Policy and Research, and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti), and other reports (one from the  U.S. Government Accountability Office was referenced). 

MSF published this report a year after the largest Ebola outbreak that happened in West Africa in 2014.

The main argument is that previous disasters involving burning buildings in US history and the subsequent investigations affected emergency response, policy making, and disaster investigation today. These past events can be applied to the 9/11 terrorist attack and investigation of the buildings afterward.

The author is Didier Fassin, a French sociologist and anthropologist who was trained as a physician in internal medicine. He developed the field of critical moral anthropology and currently does research on punishment, asylum, and inequality. This research looks at the social and political forces that affect public health trends, so is not directly involved in emergency response.

All levels of government and Indian tribal government in the United States.