Long-standing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of vulnerable families in Brazil: reflexions about inequalities, public policies and everyday

• Grant number: 23/12512-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2023
• End date: September 30, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Urban Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Taniele Cristina Rui
• Grantee: Mylena Nalin
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 22/03051-4 - Long-standing effects of COVID-19 pandemic on vulnerable families in Brazil: reflexions about inequalities, public policies and everyday, AP.PNGP.PI

Abstract

This research project aims to understand the long-term effects of Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of vulnerable families in Brazil and the ways in which those families respond to such effects. The research dialogues with the project "Implementation of COVID-19 related policies for household inequalities across five countries", coordinated by Clara Han and Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University-USA). The present proposal draws on a previous investigation that has been conducted since the outbreak of the pandemic in 16 households in the cities of Rio de Janeiro (RJ), Campinas (SP), São Paulo (SP), Altamira (PA), Belém (PA) and Ariquemes (RO). We intend to keep the same research team accompanying the same families and possibly new ones, working with the same methodology. But here our goal is to provide a long- term study on the impacts of the pandemic and pos-pandemic worlds over vulnerable populations, particularly the effects on their daily lives. Drawing on an ethnographic approach carefully designed to map how new economic and legal regulations and rearrangements in public policies unfolded in the lives of families that even before the pandemic had to cope with precarious job positions, scarce urban infrastructure (water, electricity, basic sanitation), illnesses and disabilities aggravated by poverty, and different situations of violence, perpetrated both by state agents and crime actors. We aim to describe how the pandemic opened a specific time span unequally experienced in different social contexts. We hope that this research contributes to qualify the notions of recover and resilience in a pos-pandemic world and analyses what persist.