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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) "It is important to note that these changes that incorporated gender-based violence into the human rights realm also brought the law to bear as a primary instrument of change and struggle. Calling this ‘governance feminism’, Janet Halley argues that this was the work of a certain group of feminists who came together in the 1990s, taking criminal law as a primary instrument of reform, and working in a top-down fashion to institute punishment for a global war against women."

2) "This approach inherently limits the mode of intervention. The mandate of humanitarianism – again, as defined by the new wave of ‘sans frontiere-ism’ exemplified by ` MSF – is not to reform or improve the kind of life one lives, only to preserve life itself. And yet gender-based violence is about the kind of life one lives. Under the rubric of human rights, freedom from gender-based violence is part of a parcel of rights that define what it means to be human in ways that include the right to be free from violence, the right to equality and the right to dignity"

3) "In MSF’s General Assembly debate, Rony Brauman, the former president of MSF, suggested that rather than descending into politics, humanitarians should make a distinction between describing what one witnesses, and qualifying it, which entails making a judgement. He asked one of the MSF Holland representatives, ‘How do you know the women were raped? Did you see it happening?’ Brauman proposed sticking close to what one sees, and letting others take it from there – he felt strongly that MSF should not have called for action. For him, and many others, humanitarianism is not about justice, politics or taking sides. The MSF Holland representative responded that there was a slippery slope between political neutrality and irresponsibility, and a fierce debate ensued"

Dr. Schmid's fourteen-page report includes an additional four pages of references. These references date from mid-twentieth century (1961) to mid-summer 2012 (publication of the book was 2013). The list includes studies, reports, policies, review articles, and publications, spanning from radiation absorption of Strontium to overarching reviews of nuclear energy to organizational reliability studies. These sources, if nothing else, indicate Dr. Schmid has crafted her report from multiple angles, and is not simply re-hashing Fukushima reviews.