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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 includes vast amounts of other papers, many of which governmental. The paper shows that a lot of background research was done, which is shown in the bibliography as well. The vastness of their references adds crediblity and authority to this paper. 

1. amount of articles about violence against humanitarian workers on Google Scholar (found >100)
2. violence against MSF staff in Somalia
3. Number of attacks on aid workers (https://aidworkersecurity.org/incidents/report/summary)

Research into historical case studies provided Knowles with the information to produce the research article. The only modern situation investigated was 9/11. Previous disasaters in history provided a basis with which to form the arguments about past disaster investigations and how they relate to the current ongoing investigations. 

1. "One might be tempted to see this as a medically virtuous circle, ... but one has to be conscious that it institutes the body as the immigrant's site of ultimate truth."
2. "These represent two contrasting approaches to the doctor's civic responsibility. However contradictory, the differing positions nevertheless reveal, each in its own way, how these professionals situated their medical expert opinion in a political space where the deontological points of reference had becommed blurred."
3. "...the organic importance of the body, is, basically, nothing more than the importance of the body as organ, or in other words, first as labor power, and only then as a form of self-presentation."
4. "....era in which demand for foreign labor made immigration a social necessity seems now so remote, the immigrant's body was entirely legitimized through its function as an instrument of production, the performance of which was interrupted by illness or accident."

The argument is supported through various anecdotes and testimonials. The authors use quotes from various victims in order to highlight the ways in which they were affected by Katrina. Notably, Sally, a 56-year-old woman from St. Bernard Parish who was still living in a FEMA trailer 50 miles from her original residence 2 1/2 years after the storm was interviewed. She talks about the living conditions post-Katrina. She describes families being torn apart, the National Guard using unnecessary force, and dead bodies floating in the water. The authors also use statistics and facts in order to back up their point about the horrendous conditions the survivors were in post-Katrina. A psychological and anthropological analysis also helps strengthen their argument regarding chronic disaster syndrome.

1. "First, disasters threaten harm or death to a large group of people, regardless of the actual extent of lives lost (48). Second, they affect social processes, causing disruption of services and social networks and communal loss of resources (42, 50). Third, they involve secondary consequences, namely identifiable mental and physical health outcomes, among those affected"
2. "Having the capacity to continue functioning after a traumatic event is common and characteristic of normal coping and adaptation"

3. "The key functions of pre-disaster preparation efforts are to prevent or minimize exposure to potentially traumatic disaster-related events and reduce likelihood of additional post-disaster stressors, which are both associated with post-disaster mental disorders."

Users are given data regarding radiological and nuclear emergency response. They are given data that can be further supplemented with data, images, and background material from REMM online. 

Emergency response is addressed in this report. Responses from various outlets to the Fukushima nuclear disaster are outlined and critiqued to prove the end point of Schmid, which is that an international nuclear emergency response plan is necessary.