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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?

They could have discussed logistics on transport and mass treatments more, but overall they did a good job.

Not really. There was no information provided.

They also have a fantastic list of these on their website:

Alliance for Global Justice is an organization that seeks to achieve social change and economic justice by helping to build a stronger more unified grassroots movement.

Arts and Democracy builds the momentum of a growing movement that links arts and culture, participatory democracy, and social justice.

Cowbird is a community of storytellers and the beautiful platform that we partnered with to collect and display stories in our first year.

Coney Island Generational Gap is a youth group in Coney Island that organizes work programs, arts opportunities and media courses for more than one hundred youth in the neighborhood.

El Centro is a storefront immigrant day worker center in Port Richmond, Staten Island.

Housing is a Human Right is a creative storytelling project that aims to help connect diverse communities around housing, land, and the dignity of a place to call home.

Interoccupy.Net fosters communication across the Occupy movement.

Land of Opportunity is an ongoing trans-media documentary that captures the struggle to rebuild New Orleans, one of America’s most beloved and emblematic cities. We partnered with Land of Opportunity on Katrina/Sandy.

New York Public Library has been an essential provider of free books, information, ideas, and education for all New Yorkers for more than 100 years.

New York Writers Coalition provides free creative writing workshops throughout New York City for people from groups that have been historically deprived of voice in our society.

Occupy Sandy is a mutual aid network responding to the ongoing crisis in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Parsons: New School for Design has been a pioneer in art and design higher education since its founding in 1896.

Project Hope offered free and confidential supportive counseling and public education services to Hurricane Sandy disaster survivors in New York City and Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, and Westchester Counties in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

Research Action Design (RAD) uses community-led research, transformative media organizing, technology development, and collaborative design to build the power of grassroots social movements.

The Beacon School is a public magnet high school on the Upper West Side that offers an inquiry-based college preparatory program with technology and arts infused throughout the curriculum.

The Hudson School is a private school in Hoboken, New Jersey, that provides intellectually inquisitive students in grades 5-12 with a rigorous and relevant college-preparatory education.

The MIT Center for Civic Media works hand in hand with diverse communities to collaboratively create, design, deploy, and assess civic media tools and practices–including the text and phone technology that Sandy Storyline uses.

YANA (You Are Never Alone) is a worker training center and hurricane relief hub in Rockaway Park.

"At this point, the burden of mental disorders after disasters has been well documented, and interest in the course of trajectory of psychological symptoms following disasters is growing."

"Persons who live in a community where a disaster hsa occured may differ in their degree of exposure in the event. They may be affected directly, being present at the disaster site, or indirectly, having loved ones present at the disaster site or seeing images of the disaster in the media."

"Ongoing stressors such as job loss, property damage, marital stress, physical health conditions related to the disaster, and displacement are often experienced by those affected by the disaster... Low levels of and reductions in social support are also associated iwth post-disaster psychological symptoms."

Professor Adriana Petryna teaches Anthropology at UPenn. She focuses on science and technology, globalization and health, and medical anthropology. Her focuses are intertwined with DSTS Network at times, studying incidents of interest such as this article on Chernobyl, and at other times focuses on systemic health issues in socities.