COVID and Community in Latin America

(English / Portuguese / Spanish)

ACTIVISM

Silvany Euclênio, Editor and Moderator, Pensar Africanamente YouTube Channel  (Brazil)

A teacher, social educator, and activist of the Black Social Movement, Euclênio holds a degree in History. She served as National Secretary of Policies for Traditional Communities, Secretariat of Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality, Presidency of the Republic (2011 to 2014).

The COVID19 pandemic found in Brazil a favorable environment for a true tragedy: an authoritarian, racist, misogynist government of denial and a structure marked by profound violence and racial inequality. More than half a million lives were lost, asymmetrically impacting the black population. On the other hand, there was an intense mobilization of this same population in the urban peripheries and rural communities, developing their own strategies of protection and mutual care, mainly under the leadership of black women, in the face of the absolute absence of coordinated action by the State. Canal Pensar Africanamente emerged in this context, as a communication tool aimed at the empowerment of black people, and for the strengthening of their struggles against racism and for citizenship.

EDUCATION

Ana Fanelli, CONICET Senior Researcher at the Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES) (Argentina)

Professor Fanelli works at the Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES) in Buenos Aires, where she served as director (2008-12). She has published widely on comparative policies in higher education in Latin America and has participated as senior researcher in comparative international research projects. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires and a Master in the Social Sciences from the Latin American Social Sciences School (FLACSO). Her present research focuses on massification in higher education and its impact on equity and graduation rates.

Professor Fanelli will briefly discuss the main measures adopted by Argentine universities to address teaching activities during the pandemic and some challenges for the future given the critical educational and economic situation that Argentina is undergoing. An optimistic view has emerged worldwide regarding the opportunities for innovation in education that emerge as a window of opportunity following the changes the pandemic has imposed. I focus on the obstacles Argentine universities face to take advantage of this window of opportunity. These obstacles include the high proportion of low-performing high-school graduates, the scarcity of financial resources, the institutional digital divide and the faculty’s part-time labor contracts.

POPULAR CULTURE

Marilande Martins Abreu, Professor of Sociology, Universidade Federal do Maranhão – Centro de Ciências Humanas (Brazil)

Martins Abreu is the leader of the Research Group on Religion and Popular Culture-GP Mina, in which she coordinates and guides interdisciplinary research between Anthropology and Psychoanalysis. She currently conducts ethnographic studies on religious practices, rituals, popular festivals, beliefs and entranced people at Tambor de Mina. She runs, in partnership with UWM Professor Simone Ferro, the research project, Traditional communities and African ancestry, exploring the role of women in religiosities of African matrix and popular culture. Professor Martins Abreu also researches the socioeconomic, geographic, cultural and vulnerability profiles of transvestites and transsexuals in the State of Maranhão.

Her talk will contextualize the research during the pandemic and will highlight the importance – ritual and symbolic – that women occupy in the Tambor de Mina, a religious practice with a matriarchal basis existing in the State of Maranhão, in Northern Brazil. She will base her presentation on the Terreiro de São Benedito/Justino, founded in 1896, and headed by women since it began.

Nadir Cruz, Popular Culture Leader, Maranhão (Brazil)

Cruz is an entrepreneur, speaker, community leader, culture delegate and activist. Since 1979, she has worked with popular culture in Maranhão as a member and leader of the folk group Boi da Floresta of Mestre Apolônio, currently serving as the group’s vice president. For several years she has been a member of the Maranhense Folklore Commission, and the coordinator and executive producer of the cultural project Floresta Criativa, sponsored by the BNB-Cultural, SECMA and by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture (MINC). She was responsible for coordinating workshops on embroidery used in the traditional bumba-meu-boi costumes and production of Cazumbá masks (careta), a bumba-meu-boi character from the Baixada Maranhense style. The aim of the project was to train young people and teenagers in the traditional cultural arts. Cruz is a partner of the UWM Department of Dance, hosting the Study Abroad students of Professor Simone Ferro at the Boi da Floresta headquarters, where they learn about embroidery, music and choreography,

Cruz will talk about the continuous challenges of black women in marginalized communities and their seminal imprint on the popular culture of this state, made even more fragile during the Covid-19 pandemic. She and women like her help preserve black culture and traditional memory in the region. She speaks to the history of women’s leadership and the question of how popular culture can be a means for social change inside their lived spaces. She emphasizes that culture cannot be viewed in one dimension alone, but from the broader view of social relations, economic mobility, and the complex social relations of their everyday lives.