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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?

Based on this article's bibliography, it appears that a large ammount of information from this article was drawn from MSF reports and essays, United Nations reports, and previous scholarly research done in the fields of humanitarianism, feminism, and the social aspects of medicine.

The authors of the article are Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier, both of whom are anthropologists. Andrew Lakoff works at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Stephen Collier works at The New School in New York City. The two focus a large ammount of their studies on international studies and biopolitics, and have collaborated on a number of papers pertaining to these topics. One of Lakoff's most current works is a book called Disaster and the Politics of Intervention, which may be relivant ot the the DSTS network.

This policy doesn't directly address vulnerable populations. 

This article has been referenced in various other articles in the DSTS field, including Engineering Risk and Disaster: Disaster-STS and the American History of Technology (S. Knowles) and The World Trade Center Analyses: Case Study of Ethics, Public Policy and the Engineering Profession (WH Coste).

The program is not often featured in the news, however its research and statistics are often cited in a variety of news sources and journals, including The Crime Report, a publication by John Jay College.

According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited in 52 publications, mostly pertaining to response to the Katrina disaster and the sociopolitical aftermath which is still affecting survivors to the present.