Senior Research Seminar with Professor Ann Kelly (University of Oxford)

A World Without Mosquitoes: Vector Liveliness and Necroethical Labour at the Edge of Control

 

Mosquitoes offer a limiting case for thinking about how life becomes available—or unavailable—for intervention. Understood as vectors, they are rendered legible through techniques of knowing oriented towards killability, transforming an animal into an operational category while obscuring the liveliness that exceeds it. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and historical engagement with efforts to contain and control mosquito-borne disease, this talk examines the dialectical relation between mosquito-as-vector and mosquito-as-animal, and the shifting forms of knowing, caring, and killing that relation entails. I suggest that mosquito work demands a distinctive necroethical stance: one in which protection depends not on eradication, but on restraint, deferral, and action under conditions of partial knowledge and in the aftermath of failure. Attending to the meticulous, often improvisational practices through which practitioners endeavour to elaborate and delimit human–mosquito communicability, I explore the necroethical implications of returning the mosquito, however briefly, from vector to animal, and from problem to relation—holding open a space for a cautious, consequential commitment to making futures livable, worked out close to hand and in proportion to uncertain worlds.

Ann H. Kelly is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the material and ethical politics of infectious disease control and the forms of civic ecology and practical ingenuity that shape global health interventions. Her forthcoming book, Vectors: An Anatomy of Mosquito Work (with Javier Lezaun), will be published later this year by Duke University Press.