Avian Influenza in the Metropolis

This ethnography study seeks to reorient the typical imagined geography of disease, away from exoticized lands, and towards the metropolis, asking the following questions:

  • How does LA’s metabolism shape disease ecologies, in industrialized farms, backyards, wild spaces, and more?
  • How do more-than-human agencies (such as those of migrating birds) force governments to produce new and multi-scalar understandings of disease management and surveillance?
  • How do HPAI viruses change human-animal relations in LA?
  • What are the various scales of government regulation that either curtail or increase the production of disease ecologies in LA? How do these regulations potentially reinforce tensions between logics of animal welfare, trade, and infectious disease surveillance?
  • What are the technologies that shape human understandings of zoonotic diseases? How do these technologies transform human-animal relations? What are the logics that shape the productions of these technologies?