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Accepted Paper:
Making Peace with Pests: From Conflict to Conviviality with Migrant Mosquitos Across Southeast Asia.
Tomas Cole
(Stockholm University)
This presentation delves into the vexed socio-political relations between humans and highly mobile mosquitos across Southeast Asia
Paper long abstract:
This presentation delves into the vexed socio-political relations between humans and highly mobile mosquitos. As is particularly the case in Southeast Asia, mosquitos are responsible for thousands of deaths each year, leading them to be labelled as 'pest' and subject to various large-scale programs of eradication. However, these tiny migrant insects are also essential to pollination and as nutrients in terrestrial food webs. As such, their eradication may lead the collapse of whole ecosystems, in what is increasingly being dubbed as the 'insect apocalypse'. Therefore, in this presentation I go beyond common portrays of mosquitos as 'pest' and 'epidemic villains', and the subsequent war-like relations these portrayals engender, to comparatively explore two differing modes for making peace and creating conviviality with these insects across Southeast Asia: from technological visions of altering the biology to domesticate mosquitoes in hypermodern Singapore; to vernacular and conservation practices and policies that are attempting to make peace with both humans and disease bearing insects on the war-torn Myanmar-Thai borderlands.