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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?

• “The legacy of Chernobyl has been used as a means of signaling Ukraine's domestic and international legitimacy and staking territorial claims; and as a venue of governance and state building, social welfare, and corruption.” (253)
• “In a place of tremendous economic desperation, people competed for work in the Zone of Exclusion, where salaries were relatively high and steadily paid. Prospective workers engaged in a troubling cost-benefit assessment that went some- thing like this: if I work in the Zone, I lose my health. But I can send my son to law school.” (253)
• “The issue at stake is the state's capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and nonknowledge to maintain political order.” (258)

A method used to support the claim is to relate the potential future disasters in the nuclear industry to historical examples which gives credence to the claims in the article and provide relatable evidence to the reader as to the risks associated with not only the nuclear industry but also a lack of preparedness for nuclear disasters. Data used to support the claim includes case studies that the author analyzed as a part of the article, and several other works were cited. 

• “… illness narratives - both the corpus of story episodes and the larger life "story" or illness narrative to which they contribute - have elements in common with fiction. They have a plot; succession is ordered as history or event, given configuration.” (164)
• “The diverse accounts of the illness in these narratives represent alternative plots, a telling of the story in different ways, each implying a different source of efficacy and the possibility of an alternative ending to the story. My point is not that persons having access to a plural medical system do not simply choose among alternative forms of healing but instead draw on all of them” (155)
• “Predicament, human striving, and an unfolding in time toward a conclusion are thus central to the syntax of human stories, and all of these, as we will see, are important to stories about illness experience.” (145)

“Pioneers of modern public health during the nineteenth century, such as Rudolph Virchow, understood that epidemic disease and dismal life expectancies were tightly linked to social conditions [55,56].” (Farmer 5)

“…large­-scale social forces—racism, gender inequality, poverty, political violence and war, and sometimes the very policies that address them—often determine who falls ill and who has access to care.” (Farmer 1)

“In an attempt to address these ethnic disparities in care, researchers and clinicians in Baltimore reported how racism and poverty— forms of structural violence, though they did not use these specific terms—were embodied [33,34] as excess mortality among African Americans without insurance.” (Farmer 2)

The author Miriam Ticktin is a professor of Anthropology at the New School, she has worked in the fields of Women’s Studies and English Literature. Her research focuses on medicine and science and its connection to feminist theory.

The main argument is supported primarily through policy changes that show a changing approach to public health safety in the government and private organizations, with specific examples such as changes to the US government funding for biodefense research in the early twenty-first century. The paper also includes examples of changing scientific knowledge during the later twentieth century, referencing studies and reports that highlight the changing opinions of the scientific community. Finally, the authors divide the paper into several sections each outlining a specific type of problem and the practices devised as a solution, this format clarifies the main argument and aids the reader in understanding the authors views.

The system relies on the basic technical aspects of a smartphone, including a working camera, data, and the ability to access a contacts list. This suggests some form of partnership with the service providers of users phones, which is commonly the case with smartphone apps.

The film primarily suggests health infrastructure as a preemptive intervention for outbreaks, with the belief that existing facilities would be better equipped to deal with potentially disastrous diseases when they initially appeared and prevent a wide-scale outbreak. The film also suggests that health education would aid the public in protecting themselves and understanding the necessary steps in stopping a virus.

This policy applies to anyone in the Bethel Township Fire and EMS Department that has an existing gun license and a concealed carry permit. It does not provide any additional legal restrictions or benefits in applying for a firearm license.