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Context: Currently, I´m based in Bogota, Colombia´s capital city of 8 million people. At the beginning of March, the government informed about the first COVID-19 case in the country, a young woman who came back from a trip to Italy. The 19th, with less than 30 confirmed cases, Bogota declared a provisional and pedagogical quarantine for a weekend. Around a dozen of cities followed Bogota´s initiative, living with few choices the central government to take a different approach. On March 23 the President declared national state of emergency, and extending a national quarantine, with few exceptions (medical staff, public servants, police and military forces, inner city transportation, among others). After a month under quarantine we have witnessed a strong support to the central government, a national coordination approach few times seen in the country. Political opposition forces and the Congress have been behind the scenes. News networks have displayed an enourmous time to medical, epidemiological, health and scientific experts. President and local leaders speak to the public nearby or citing experts from top scientific institutions. Epidemiological models are shaping decisions about when to go out, who can go out, and how normal life can be retake.

Analytical approach: I am analyzing how COVID-19 governance is taking place in Colombia, through the participation of scientific experts. I am concerned about how scientific data and information are displayed and communicated, focusing on health and epidemiological issues. I am interested in foolowing how other researchers analyze data platforms, transparency issues, and the articulation between health safety and inequality and economic impact.

Contact: awx1111@gmail.com

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?