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What do you think is the biggest difference between the ocean perspective and the land perspective?

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?

"Moreover, in any mumber of disasters over the past two centuries, the 'disaster investigation,' far from proving itself the dispassionate, scientific verdict on causality and blame, actually emerges as a hard-fought contest to define the moment in politics and society, in technology and culture."

"And, no investigation he could provide would change the fact that most Americans viewed the burning of the Capitol in 1814 as a diplomatic and military, not an engineering, disaster."

"Certainly the move to NIST places a great premium on the power of "investigation" as not only a technical, but also a moral tool, a sacred act, assigning a higher meaning to the tests and calculations that must ultimately assign causes and fix blame--but this is nothing new in American history. While the investigator's tools may have sharpened since Latrobe's study of the Capitol, the Hague Street inquest, or the Iroquois Fire, disaster investigation still pits expert against expert, the demand for patient study against the will to rebuild and forget."

This policy was, in part, designed to prevent "patient dumping" whereby hospitals would refuse to treat certain patients due to inability to pay for treatment and either refuse admittance or transfer them to other hospitals. Furthermore, it specifically addresses female patients in active labor, requiring that hospitals ensure that these patients are also treated and stabilized in the emergency department or receiving facility.