Paper short abstract:

In the context of a global health technology involving bioengineered mosquitos, this paper considers how unforeseen events shed light on the ways in which multispecies relations are entangled within the complex fabric of the city of Medellín, and how local and global dynamics of governance emerge.

Paper long abstract:

The World Mosquito Program is currently releasing bioengineered mosquitos across the city of Medellín, Colombia, as a potential new global health technology to combat diseases like Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. The city is cast as an urban living laboratory, through which scientists, human inhabitants, and mosquitos are producing and experiencing new forms of entanglement and cohabitation.

The life of these modified mosquitos and that of their human counterparts are intricately bound to one another. When at one point during my research the bioengineered mosquitos started to die, this co-dependency both for life (of the mosquitos) and livelihoods (of the project workers) was thrown into light. Blame and hypotheses surrounding these deaths reveal how the complex social, political, and ecological fabric of the city forms far more than just a backdrop for these multispecies interactions.

This paper will explore these entanglements in order to consider the ways in which local insect-human cohabitation is choreographed by urban dynamics. Based on 11 months of fieldwork, this paper examines the relations between humans and mosquitos in a complex urban setting, asking how, in the context of an unforeseen event such as the death of bioengineered mosquitos, questions of local and global governance emerge.