Shweta Rani, Faculty Teaching Associate at the Centre for Writing and Pedagogy (CWP) at Krea University has contributed an essay titled Living with Mosquitoes: Exploring the Dengue Outbreak in Delhi to the edited volume Event and Everyday: Empiricisms and Epistemologies. This volume, edited by Prof Yasmeen Arif, has been published by Orient BlackSwan.
About the Volume
The volume explores the relationship between Event the extraordinary and Everyday, the ordinary in both concept and practice. Based on Shweta Rani’s fieldwork, her essay in the volume argues that it is productive to explore an epidemic through the everyday multispecies encounters in the city rather than through an episodic imagination of the disease event.
Abstract
In 2015, Delhi witnessed what can now be called the last dengue outbreak in the city. In this article, Shweta Rani draws upon her fieldwork conducted during and since the outbreak to comment on the rubric of Event-Everyday. It investigates how people – city dwellers, medical practitioners, officials, municipal workers, dengue patients, and their caretakers – deal with the persisting presence of mosquitoes in their everyday lives. While state health strategies seek absolute human-mosquito isolation, field narratives portray a more complex picture. For instance, municipal workers assigned the task of ‘killing’ mosquitoes encounter the resilience of an insect as a lifeform. Moreover, people, even while dealing with the dengue outbreak, don’t necessarily perceive its vector as their deadly foe. Shweta Rani argues that these modalities of living with a supposedly undesirable non-human other are too intricate to be captured by the episodic imagination of an event, as the latter is understood in the common parlance. Instead, paying heed to the intertwining of ‘event’ with its apparent antonym, the ‘everyday’, is essential. Establishing everyday’s dynamism and its susceptibility to innovation is analogous to challenging the temporal fixity of an event. Hence, the burden of this work is to demonstrate the potential of everyday to enrich our understanding of an event. The essay ends with potential questions this scholarship might enable us to ask.
Citation
Rani, Shweta. 2024. “Living with Mosquitoes: Exploring the dengue outbreak in Delhi.” In Event-Everyday: Epistemologies and Empiricisms, edited by Yasmeen Arif, 248-267. Orient-Blackswan Press. ISBN no.- 978-93-5442-831-9
