Flavia Medeiros Santos
Grant Type
Global InitiativesInstitutional Affiliation
Federal U. of Santa CatarinaGrant number
Gr. GIG-5Approve Date
June 8, 2020Project Title
Santos, Dr. Flavia Medeiros, Federal University of Santa Catarina. Florianopolis, Brazil, – To build capacity in anthropology through "Social and Moral Regulations of the New Corona Pandemic in Brazil: an Ethnographic and Intersectional Analysis"This project aims to examine how social and moral regulations are being implemented during covid-19 pandemic in Brazil from a perspective of vulnerable social groups, observing the effects of death management and the conditions of social isolating in the life of those who are treated as socially invisible people. We are going to conduct ethnographic research, considering racial, ethnic, class and gender markers operated in the different possibilities of (i)legibility of the state (Das and Poole, 2004), to understand how access to urgent rights and resources are modulated locally in the context of this global crisis. That is, what subjects located at “margins of the State” can access related to practices and the production of bureaucratic records. From its coded and secret form of organized information, ?the State? controls subjects and their territories in a regime of physical distance and social isolation due to the risks of contamination by the virus. The objective is to describe and analyze how the pandemic exposes and allows to reproduce inequalities exhibited in Brazilian society, as how much it produces new forms of ?doing-State? (Souza Lima, 2012) and builds a new arena for social relations and, consequently , to conflicts. In this sense, there are two focuses of analysis: (1) as sanitary measures and institutional treatment given to the dead, considering the flow of death records and the processes of institutional construction of the dead during the pandemic; (2) as sanitary measures and their dissemination and implementation with invisible and racialized threats, such as: peoples, homeless people, slum dwellers, informal workers, public service professionals and female heads of families. To conduct research, as responsible for the creation of this application, two black Brazilian anthropologists, with a dialogue already with these groups of previous research carried out in the Brazilian states of Para’ba, Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina. Through the use of technological resources we will conduct an ethnography online, as virtual observations, interviews and conversations. In addition, we will have official reports, media news, websites and other materials to analyse, as well quantitative data officially released or requested via the Access to Information Law (BRAZIL, Law No. 12,527 / 2011) directly to public agencies. We will also reflect on the methodological practices of observation (direct, participant, floating) in anthropology and the maintenance of the field diary during the pandemic period. When producing records and data that will be quoted from a contrasting perspective, we will reflect on the tools and methods that characterize our filed, as well reflect on how the anthropological comparative method in the construction of ethnographic knowledge can be used to design of a cartography on the effects of COVID-19 through a ?digital ethnography?. In this sense, a proposal on how to produce a social cartography from places and groups who have their lives and deaths impacted by covid-19, mediated by digital tools that will improve forms to indicate data and elements for social incidence and transformation.