Jose Hasemann

JOSE HASEMANN, then a graduate student at University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, was awarded a grant in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Mosquitoes and Moral Worth: Viewing Public Health Programs through the Lens of ‘Deservingness,” supervised by Dr. Merrill Singer. The grantee conducted fourteen months of ethnographic dissertation research in Comayag’ela, Honduras. The research examined the effects of public health prevention campaigns for Aedes control on the lives of low-income urban residents. In this project, public health prevention programs for vector-borne infectious diseases were conceptualized as one manifestation of a system of governance intended to guide experience, shape social relations, and reinforce ideas about which population groups were deserving (or not deserving) of careful, health-promoting (rather than disease-containing) governmental policy. The research produced data on how practices associated with neoliberal economic and social agendas impacted vector-control campaigns and target recipients’ perceptions of the extant public health system. Participants’ relationship with and perceptions of the public health system affected the local implementation of preventive practices and health-seeking behavior. The grantee employed quantitative (household surveys) and qualitative (participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, open-ended interviews, and photovoice) methodologies to collect the data for this dissertation project.