COVID19 Places: India
This essay scaffolds a discussion of how COVID19 is unfolding in India. A central question this essay hopes to build towards is: If we examine the ways COVID19 is unfolding in India, does "Ind
This essay scaffolds a discussion of how COVID19 is unfolding in India. A central question this essay hopes to build towards is: If we examine the ways COVID19 is unfolding in India, does "Ind
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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?
Sonja D. Schmid is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech. Her area of expertise is in the history of technology, science and technology policy, and social studies of risk. Specifically, Schmid researches the history and the organization of nuclear industries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. With respect to emergency response, Schmid has studied how agencies and personel have responded to nuclear disasters.
A recent article Schmid has written: Schmid, Sonja D. "What If There's a next Time? Preparedness after Chernobyl and Fukushima - A European-American Response." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. N.p., 01 July 2016. Web. 05 Sept. 2016.
I looked further into governmental relief policies after disasters, mental health policies in regard to emergencies, and New Orleans current state.
This study was funded by Grants-in-aid for the Cancer Control Policy from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan.
Miriam Ticktin received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Ticktin is now an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility.
Paul Farmer is an American physician and anthropologist who is known for providing appropriate healthcare in under developed regions and developing countries. Farmer is situated in emergency response in that he is a physician providing care to those in need and works toward ensuring that people will have access to healthcare despite socioeconomic conditions. Bruce Nizeye works alongside Farmer and specializes in TB infection control in Rwanda. Sara Stulac is a physician who specializes in women’s and children’s healthcare. Her focus has included pediatric HIV prevention and treatment, malnutrition care, inpatient pediatrics and neonatology, and pediatric oncology and other non-communicable disease treatment. Salmaan Keshavjee is a physician who specializes in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and in providing access to healthcare in poverty stricken regions.
This is a collage made from the visuals discussed by this artifact's contributors at the T-STS COVID19 India Group meeting on November 24, 2020