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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 system allows for compilation and continued monitoring of the aftermath of these hurricanes. The platform also provides access to the film and organization following those still effected by the disasters years later. It also serves as an area for conversation and discussion for how to mitigate the effects of disasters in the future.

1) "It's a community that's all too aware that declaring a crisis doesn't actually mean anything significant will change...Within the last 12 months, there have been multiple "crisis" states declared in Indigenous communities across the country, including even the entire territory of Nunavut—where 84 percent of the population are Inuit."

2) " "What do you find 20 years ago? The same conversations we are having now about suicide. The same conversations we are having now about the lack of mental health. The same conversations that we are having around socio economic development," Tait told VICE."

3) "One of the reasons Canada conveniently forgets the multiple recommendations and reports around youth suicide and mental health is that when it comes to Indigenous peoples they are considered "the other" "

The author is Adriana Petryna, a professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her work as at the University, Dr. Petryna has written several books and articles focusing on the effects of cultural and political forces on science and medicine. Other interests include social studies of science and technology, globalization of health, medical anthropology, and anthropological methods

This chapter from the work "Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: an anthropological perspective" seems to most frequently appear on websites for various Universities and Colleges. Moreover, the work as a whole seems to have been cited several times by subsequent reports further defining patient narration and medical relations.

Dr. Ticktin states in her introduction the report came about through both her personal experience with humanitarian efforts & sexual violence treatment and through supplemental studies. Her bibliography reflects this, and includes multiple studies/reports from humanitarian organizations. Additionally, she utilized multiple independent media sources discussing sexual violence in conflicts, the targeting of female populations, and humanitarian efforts within this realm. The bibliography also includes a multitude of research articles from various human rights journals and publications pertaining to female rights during conflicts.

The NPR article appears to be a compilation of interviews (performed by the author and other media sources) with pertinent individuals (public health officials, economics experts) and research from agency reports (US Accountability Office, Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti).