Affiliations: [a] Graduate Program in Urban Management, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR), Curitiba, PR, Brazil | [b] Graduate Program in Communication of Science and Culture, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, SP, Brazil
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Rodrigo Firmino, Graduate Program in Urban Management, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR), Rua Imacullada Conceição, 1155, Curitiba, PR 80215-901, Brazil. Tel.: +55 41 3271 2623; E-mail: rodrigo.firmino@pucpr.br.
Note: [1] All authors contributed equally to the paper.
Abstract: Brazil has been standing out as one of the worst places on Earth to be during a global health crisis, especially for those whose struggle for basic humanitarian rights is already routine. How do the political environment and historical inequalities in countries like Brazil affect the ways in which public policy and technologies are framed as responses for the pandemic crisis? In this paper we aim to present the sequence of actions and omissions in the fight against sars-cov2 in Brazil, concentrating on measures based on the use of digital technologies and the sociotechnical arrangements unfolding in materialities that give shape to such measures. We will also discuss possible repercussions of the widespread adoption of surveillance technologies as a quick fix to the effects of the pandemic. Our focus is to explain how the materiality of the virus and its political as well as territorial effects are combined with digital technologies as responses (or lack of them) in the fields of healthcare, education, communication and labour in the context of the Global South.
Keywords: Surveillance techno-politics, health crisis management, COVID-19, Global South, spatial managementKey points for practitioners:•Different spheres of government dispute their autonomy over the health crisis management, which increases risks of worsening the effects of the virus;•The use of surveillance technologies against COVID-19 advances inconsistently, and the pandemic accelerated uncritical adoption of platforms in education and work;•Different manifestations of the virus in wealth and poor parts of the cities of the Global South exposes a selective and racist discrimination in the responses to the crisis;•Attention must be paid to the complex interplay between the use of monitoring technologies, governmental actions, and different effects across national territories.
