Child care and participation in the Global South: an anthropological study from squatter houses in Buenos Aires (original) (raw)

On the Streets: Deprivation, risk, and communities of care in pandemic times

Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 20,, 2023

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, public concerns about 'vulnerable people in street situation' have grown in South American countries. These concerns focus on the risk of sexual violence, exploitation, and human trafficking faced by migrants and women in the sex sector. This article examines these public concerns and the discourses of risk that structure them, taking Ecuador and the border province of El Oro as a case study. It analyses how irregularised migrants and women offering sexual and erotic services talk about 'risk' and 'exploitation', and how they respond to crisis, controls, and restrictions by becoming involved in risky activities and building communities of care. These communities are solidarity alliances that connect and offer mutual support to people confronting deprivation and violence. They are not restricted to the household or the domestic sphere; rather, they constitute different forms of 'family' and 'home' building. The article is based on a participatory research in El Oro, a place with a long history of human trafficking that has not been recognised or studied.

Exposed bodies, open houses. Embodiment and domestic life during the pandemic scenario in urban middle classes in Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Cambio. Rivista sulle trasformazioni sociali, 2020

In this paper, we analyze the transformative living conditions for middle classes in the City of Buenos Aires and Greater Buenos Aires in relation to the house and the body during these first two months of mandatory isolation. By gathering notes and records of our researches, we seek to problematize the visions that simplify the situation of confinement. The queries that organize the text are: What structural inequalities are revealed by this pandemic? Which modulations do middle-class people experience in the face of this?

“Stay at Home” Inhabiting Public Space During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Social Productions of Care with People Experiencing Homelessness in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires

International Journal on Homelessness

Living on the streets is a global public health problem that is institutionalized in different local contexts. After the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was declared in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), the care coverage for Persons Experiencing Homelessness (PEH) was reduced to a few social and community organizations. This paper presents the preliminary results of participatory research using a network research design. We worked with referents from community organizations and PEH, combining synchronous and asynchronous actions through digital media and face-to-face strategies. The COVID-19 pandemic scenario generates challenges for interventions with PEH by revaluating narratives of risk. The relationship between self-care and collective care is problematized in the responses generated by civil society to ensure continuity of care in this socio-health emergency.

The body and the house matters: reflections on isolation in Buenos Aires

Doing Sociology Blog, 2020

The COVID-19 may have no nationality, but its impacts are locally experienced. Still today, the sense of urgency reaches us through mass media and social networks when we hear new worldwide updates about contagion and regarding research advances into finding a vaccine to counteract the virus. In this context, the house and the body gained relevance as they became vital for understanding the impact of this pandemic and with it, all its material and symbolic effects. In Argentina, this is unevenly experienced and lived. On March 20th, preventive, social and obligatory isolation, established by the national government.

Mobilizing care and housing access. Demanding responses to the local government in buenos aires in the context of the covid-19 pandemic

Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2023

The Covid-19 pandemic made starkly visible the housing crisis in the City of Buenos Aires characterized by the increasing presence of precarious housing situations. The mandatory social isolation imposed nationwide at the onset of the pandemic significantly delayed the spread of the virus. Yet, this policy revealed the exclusion of the most vulnerable populations-the unhoused and slum dwellers. The city government of Buenos Aires offered the unhoused and slum dwellers patch-aid policies that immediately triggered the reaction of a collective of unhoused advocacy groups and grassroots organizations (GOs). Long-term and new GOs, demanded from the local government, adequate housing and immediate sanitary assistance for those who were already living in precarious conditions. We selected two case studies that were at the forefront of the array of claims and critiques to the local government during the pandemic. Most of these claims were situated under the constitutional "right-to-housing" established in the Argentinean constitution. We argue that the GOs mobilized an "ethic of care" whereby they built networks of care and assistance rooted in the idea of a relational social ontology. At the same time, they did not intend to replace the State's withdrawal from being a welfare provider and guarantor of rights, but to call attention to the State's moral obligation to care.

Deviant Motherhood: House Arrest and Social Belonging in Argentina

Social Text (2020) 38 (1 (142)): 67–88., 2020

This article discusses two intertwined forms of care that engage with incarcerated women in Argentina. First, it examines the consequences of a policy change that allows incarcerated women who are pregnant and/or caregivers of small children to serve their time at home. Institutional confinement extends beyond the prison and has taken various forms, such as the shelter, the asylum, relocation centers, and prison camps. Inspired by recent prison studies that disrupt the prison as a fixed and hardened site, this article contends that house arrest is far from a benefit. Rather, home confinement constitutes a site of neglect where women must fend for themselves to perform reproductive labor as a way to complete their sentence. This practice reveals new forms of social control and state surveillance in which judges, social workers, and penitentiaries determine which women are appropriate for house arrest while policing the terms of their confinement. Second, this article presents the author’s fieldwork involving a women’s collective that offers art-related workshops to encourage incarcerated women to develop a different understanding of their agency and potential. Institutions such as neighborhood and women’s collectives offer new forms of sociality that redefine imprisonment. As women under house arrest are expected to provide for themselves and their children, it is important to understand how they meet such challenges, considering how gender norms and institutional violence impact women’s lives today

Outbreak over outbreak: children living the pandemic in the aftermath of Chile's social unrest

Children's Geographies, 2021

Children’s experiences of the pandemic in Chile need to be understood in the context of the social unrest that started explosively (although with a much longer history) in October 2019. We reflect here on children and young peoplés social and political participation in this process, the position of childhood in the Constitution and general inequality as the context in which the pandemic developed. The invisibility of children’s experiences and practices, their generalised vulnerability and the acute socioeconomic inequalities that affect them are discussed as the key elements shaping the impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic in their everyday lives and spatialities.