Reproducing Precarity:Interspecies Entanglements, Neglected Things & Fragile Ecologies of Care

This is an experiment in which we are explore interspecies encounters with biomedicine, reproduction, environment and precarious lives in Brazil. In the paper we draw upon and extend anthropological and theoretical work on reproduction and the environment to offer a critical perspective on public health. Our aim is to extend work on interspecies occupational health (Friese & Latimer 2019) and offer a position paper on rethinking approaches to how ‘(re)production’ (re)produces precarious environments to offer possibilities of caring interventions built on taking a social, transdisciplinary and interspecies approach to neglected things. Our analysis explores the Fiocruz Social Science Zika Network’s encounters with mosquitoes, scientists and women in Brazil. Our attention is on the backgrounded practices and materialities and lived realities in the making and unmaking of knowledge. This involved seeing how our actants (scientists, health care workers, mothers and mosquitoes) are involved in reproduction – of science and society as well as the generation of progeny. In the paper we begin by considering how Brazilian public health concerned with the Zika crisis intensifies the need for vector control and enacts reproduction, environment and precarity. We argue that as at the same time as Brazilian public health casts the mosquito as epidemic villain pregnant women were performed and responsabilized as the vectors through which the arbovirus could infect the unborn child. We draw upon the Zika Social Science networks encounters with scientists, community health workers and women to offer an alternative critical public health vision of the relationships between reproduction, precarity and environment. Specifically, we identify how scientists emphasise the need to know the mosquito as animal and even gather the mosquito into the fold of humanitarian approaches to arboviruses. We end by asking what is the significance of this shift away from a discourse of ‘vector’ control and whether it opens up possibilities for an interspecies and collective public health.