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Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
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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?

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Alexi Martin
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The data used to produce the claims in the report were investigations of past American disasters and how these shortcomings eventually lead to a failure for those investigating 9/11. Direct quotes and explanation of each of the historical events were also used to support the claims made.

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Alexi Martin
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The author is Didier Fassin, he is an anthropologist and socialogist who conducted research in Senegal, Ecuador, South AFrica and France. He used to be a doctor, but now is a professor at Princeton. He is suited in respect to emergency response because studying the people is how to help those affected by disaster.

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Alexi Martin
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7. The article’s bibliography is extensive, this points out that there was time and effort put in place to gather the proper evidence in order to prove their argument. There is also a lot of supporting evidence, proving that the argument is valid.

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Alexi Martin
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The main findings/arguements presented in this article is the need to stop putting the possibility of a nuclear disaster on the back burner and becoming more well versed in how to handle these accidents and how to prevent them from occuring. This can be accomplished by creating an internation SWAT team that is trained to handle international nuclear diasters.

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Alexi Martin
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The report's bibliography, while not directly presented, can presume to be very extensive. The atuhor needs evidence to support her argument as well as her field work. Backround knowledge also needs to be supported.