Rapid qualitative health research from the Global South: Reflections and learnings from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The objective of this paper is to provide insights into our experiences undertaking qualitative rapid research in Latin American contexts based on fieldwork from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. We focus on the insights and learning processes that emerged from our research teamwork during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research projects are part of an international collaboration led by the Rapid Research Evaluation and Appraisal Lab (RREAL) to explore the experiences of COVID-19 Frontline Healthcare Workers.

Between hate speech and fear: throwing evil across the border.

This text seeks to problematize a dominant representation about epidemics, pandemics and major catastrophes, which describes its origin as external, exotic and foreign. In general, both from Hollywood catastrophe cinema, to medical-scientific discourses, and from philosophy to conspiracy theories and hate speech, any threat or evil is placed outside of society itself, there is always another, who prosecutes a moral fault that justifies the need to combat, isolate or eliminate them. We propose to analyse arguments that have circulated around the current coronavirus pandemic, especially those that place the possibility of salvation in isolation and fear, to problematize certain ideas naturalized in discourses that are later translated into political practices or actions.

Emergency care under the magnifying glass: a review of ethnographic studies in the scientific literature on hospital emergency services.

The article presents a review of ethnographic studies in the scientific literature on hospital emergency services, with the objective of systematizing the studies and their principal findings, referring to the health-disease-healthcare process in hospital emergency services from an ethnographic perspective. An integrative literature review was performed of studies published in Argentine and international indexed journals and in the following electronic databases: PubMed, VHL, Scopus, Redalyc, and SciELO. The corpus of the analysis consisted of a total of 69 articles, which were submitted to content analysis, having identified the following analytical dimensions: quality of care, communication and bonds, subjectivity, application of information technologies, methodological reflection, patients' experiences and practices, decision-making, and violence.

[The medicalization of life: hybrids against the dichotomy Nature/Culture].

This paper aims to analyze the process of medicalization in current societies, starting from the description of the way in which medicine gradually appropriated various aspects of everyday life that were once part of the life cycle of people. At the theoretical level, we are based on authors such as Descola and Latour, who problematize the dichotomy between Nature and Culture, and propose the need to think from a superior episteme. Methodologically, this theoretical proposal enables an analysis of the medicalization that can illuminate what is hidden in the discourse and biomedical practices: the sociocultural, political and economic processes that are part of these "objects" of Medicine.

[Political dimensions of an epidemic: the case of influenza A (H1N1) in the Argentine press].

The current study addresses social representations of the influenza A (H1N1) epidemic in Argentina in 2009, in the country's mainstream newspapers. The methodology was twofold, qualitative and quantitative, with an analysis of two dimensions: the construction of the epidemic as an "object" (designation and characterization) and the sources of information in the news stories, seeking to identify the social actors involved in each case. The results show that designating the epidemic as "H1N1" rather than "swine flu" was a conscious political decision to exempt a hazardous form of livestock production from its role in the disease, while focusing responsibility on individual patients.

Pathways as "signatures in landscape": towards an ethnography of mobility among the Mbya-Guaraní (Northeastern Argentina).

Processes of spatial mobility among the Mbya are of interest in anthropological and ethnobiological studies, as these processes are related to transformations in the landscape and the environment. Despite this, ethnographic literature usually focuses itself on the mobility of Guaraní communities from the perspective of population dynamics on a regional scale. Our research among two Mbya-Guaraní communities in the Argentinean province of Misiones has enabled us to recognize patterns of mobility on a micro-scale.