Casual killing in the home: Ecological citizenship and the micro-geopolitics of mosquito cohabitation

Abstract

This article explores how the visceral acts of being bitten by and killing mosquitoes can underpin the formation of ecological citizenship. This form of citizenship is premised on human-nature entanglement and raises questions concerning how the rights and responsibilities stemming from such entanglement become distributed across the public and private domains. As a space in which mosquito cohabitation is contested daily, the home is a key site through which ecological citizenship can be forged and theoretical debates concerning urban political ecology can be extended. Human-mosquito entanglements in the home can reveal the limits of public pest management strategies, the partiality of nature as both an implicit good and an implicit threat, and how everyday acts of killing can shape the ecological subjectivities of city dwellers. Drawing on qualitative data from focus groups with residents living in areas at-risk of dengue, follow-up in-home ethnographies, and a series of interviews with government stakeholders and representatives of pest management companies, we consider how the act of killing mosquitoes can provide insight into the place of the home in nature, and the importance of nature in the home.