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COVID 19 PLACES: ECUADOR

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This essay supports an upcoming discussion of how COVID-19 is unfolding in Ecuador and a broader discussion within the Transnational STS COVID-19 project.

Shuar Testimony

This audio was sent by Manuel Maiche, community leader of Kuamar, part of the Shuar territory in Ecuador.

Ecuador Place Essay Image

Image created with the use of a free image by Crystal Mirallegro (Unsplash website) for Ecuador's covid19 place essay

Image with rainforest trees on background

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joerene.aviles

1. In this sense, gender-based violence makes it clear that the suffering body – while purportedly universal – requires certain political, historical and cultural attributes to render it visible and worthy of care.

2. It seems that humanitarianism, as universalism, both erases and depends on difference; on the one hand, it manages difference, declawing it so that it doesn’t tear apart the humanitarian kit, made to fit and rehabilitate everyone into a basic bare-bones humanity.

3. In this sense, bringing gender-based violence into the humanitarian mission has inadvertently opened up a space for confrontation with politically significant forms of difference and inequality in their real and rabid forms.

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joerene.aviles

Bruze Nizeye and Sara Stulac both work with Partners in Health (founded by Paul Farmer) while Salmaan Keshavjee is a physician and researcher whose expertise is in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and global health. Farmer's and Keshavjee's anthropological research in particular is important to emergency response because it would allow for improved preparation of treatment to those communities. Their work in seeing the social causes of health epidemics would also allow for better prevention of disasters.