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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?

With every new disaster it faces, the ARC draws much on its own research and the experiances of the Global Red Cross. Recent major domsetic disasters the ARC has faced include Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, 

I looked into the history of the MSF, the Congo Republic's Civil War, and international policy regarding the treatment of sexual and gender based violance in the humanitarian community, including the security council legislation refereced in the article.

The citations found in this article's bibliography tell us that the information presented was drawn from various research articles about past responses to large disease outbreaks, and public health policies regarding topics such as food safety and bioweapons. This article is an interpertation of existing information, and does not seem to provide any new research.

I researched

1. Early fire response systems mentioned in the article, such as fireproof blankets, early fire extinguishers, and fireproof building construction

2. Underwriters Labs and other safety research labratories

3. The final reports on the cause of the WTC collapse

Didier Fassin is a French anthropologist and a sociologist in the school of science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Fassan is also trained as a physician in internal medicine and holds a degree in public health. Some of his early research focused on medical anthropology, the AIDS epidemic, mortality disparities, and global health. 

I looked up disaster capitalism, how emergency response mutual aid to the katrina disaster was handled, and how reconstruction has progressed in more recient years.

The bibliography of this article shows that most of the data drawn for this paper was from other scholarly papers, which leads me to believe that no new research or studies were done to gain information for this article.

The viewpoints of elected goverment officials on the state and federal levels are lacking from this film.