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Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
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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?

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Andreas_Rebmann
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This article mainly addressed improving the way research is done and published in the realms of psychiatry. The author communicates the value and use of clinical vignettes, saying that randomized trials and standard data collecting do not tell the full story in psychological medicine, and vignettes and anecdotes fill otherwise empty gaps. Overall, the addition of story-telling to research helps solidify researchers’ and physicians’ understanding and communication about mental illness

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Andreas_Rebmann
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Social forces such as racism, gender inequality and poverty impact health issues, determining who becomes ill and who can access proper healthcare. This interaction is imperative to understand when looking at broader public health. While understanding the molecular basis of disease will help us prevent illness, addressing biosocial phenomena is critical to public health

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Andreas_Rebmann
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There were 7 so I did a few:

Suyoun Jung - Researches fragile states, and security, developement and Korea. These places are highly at-risk for disasters and at-risk for difficulties controlling disasters once they occur.

Gulzhan Asylbek Kyzy is working on the impact evaluation of the epacebuilding programme in Kyrgyzstan. These kind of programs could help address less developed countries' infrastructure and systems weaknesses, and if one proves successful, it could be used as a model for future efforts.

Nerina Weiss has a PhD in Social Anthropology and researches Violance and conflict, gender, political anthropology, migration, and torture and social suffering. He work is also very related to what we focus on in developing countries struggling to manage their populations and political atomosphere.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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This chapter was produce by following the issue of illness of undocumented citizens over the course of several decades, and examining the relationship between how they are treated and social and economic changes. It is linked into changes in policy, memorandums and individual opinions.