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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 bibliography of this article is extensive, showing a clear depth of research. Information from this article was drawn from not only first hand resources such as interviews and news reports, but also from goverment reports and the work of other researchers.

According to Google Scholar, this piece has been cited in 39 other articles, mostly relating to disaster recovery and phychopathology.

This film would best address an audiance of young to middle aged adults, possibly with military ties such as being a veteran. These people would have an interest in the acountability of the goverment and its various agencies and branches.

The author of the article is Sonja D. Schmid. She is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. She holds a Ph D in STS from Cornell University. Dr. Schmid speaks fluent Russian and primarily investigates the history and organization of Soviet and Eastern European nuclear affairs, as well as the the challenges of global nuclear emergency response.

The narrative is sustained through emotional stories of end of life care from both the physician and patient perspectives performed by both Dr. Atul Gawande and by other healthcare professionals such as oncologists, palliative care experts, other surgeons. The scientific background of end of life care isn't really discussed in detail, as this film focuses more on the social and emotional aspects of this topic.

According to its mission statement, "The American Red Cross prevents and alleviates human suffering in the face of emergencies by mobilizing the power of volunteers and the generosity of donors.​"

This article utilizes excerpts from interviews to illustrate the story narrative of an illness, showing how emotion and values are reflected in the creation of a "plot" of the narrative, and uses statistics and broader research to analize these stories from a broader, more societal perspective. 

The red cross relies on notification systems of disaster to mobilize their volunteers such as those created by FEMA, NOAA, and other goverment services, transportation infrastructure and technology to move supplies and people from place to place, established red cross infrastructure of supply stockpiles, specialized vehicles, and training centers.

This discusses the rape and gender based violance in the context of humanitarian response. It looks at how rape and gender based violance is seen by the humanitarian communty and the complexities of determining how it should be treated, if at all. The article discusses the factors leading to gender based violance and the different approaches that the humanitarian community could pursue it with, finding the pros and cons of each, citing the need to maintain neutrality, be apolitical, and be equal in care, treatment, and aid for all groups affected.