POPULAÇÃO DE RUA, A PANDEMIA DA COVID-19 E AS POLÍTICAS DA VIDA E DA MORTE

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on the Covid-19 pandemic and the politics of  life and death, trying to highlight the productive character of the moral in the constitution of new scenarios and questions for our world. We will carry out such reflections from an ethnographic engagement with the forms of mobilization around the protection of the homeless population in the Covid-19 pandemic scenario. We will show how the Covid-19 pandemic´s can be understood simultaneously as a kind of "chronic acute event" that brings into scene necropolitical forms of government, implying in the management of the pandemic definitions about the value and meaning of life and death of certain populations. We will  also emphasize the forms of mobilization of political activism in the area, which, since the 2000s, has been characterized by the growing use of the language of rights and the denunciation of inequalities, drawing attention to the fact that the pandemic may be (re)introducing moral grammars associated with living on the streets that work from their association with individualized suffering. These dimensions restore a certain structural moral tension in this field of social intervention, between individual suffering and the inequalities of people's life infrastructure.