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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?

This policy applies to the demographic deemed mentally disabled and are covered by Medicaid.

This film is aimed at a more general audience as most of the science has been "dumbed down". It offers a more emotional portrayel as opposed to a scientific.

This, like many apps, don't exactly work in rural areas in which people are unable to have access to such amenities as cellular devices.

The article involves several disasters throughout American history. The article examines the similarities and differences between the events, their responses, and the policies enacted because of them. The 1814 burning Capitol Building, Hague Street boiler explosion, and the attack on the WTC in 2001 are examples used by the author. The article makes the argument that the investigations resulted in recommendations for change to policy to prevent future damage.

This book has seemingly only been referenced by the author. The book did happen to win The Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and is therefore acknowledged by the professional community as being a substantial piece of literature.

This article is supported with statistical studies and in-the-field interviews of clinicians and patients. 

The first listed author on the paper is Ludgivar Foghammar. Foghammar is a research fellow at Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPI) and specializes in economics, politcal science, and global health. The second author listed is Suyoun Jang, a researcher at SIPI studies the fragile states of, security, and developement of Korean Culture. A article of note from Jang is titled 'If you can read this, you probably don't live in a dangerous place'.

If you can read this, you probably don't live in a dangerous place (B