Spotlight
Eyes on COVID-19
Our latest Spotlight holds a collection of COVID-related articles.
If you would be interested in contributing articles or photographs, please contact June Carolyn Erlick, jerlick@fas.harvard.edu.
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Articles
September 2021 Articles
Past Months
Pandemic and Museums
English + Español
Museums navigate the challenges of satisfying the interests and curiosity of their patrons. Many crave to gawk at unusual, rare, strange, interesting or beautiful objects but…
Remaking the Welfare State Pandemic: Successes and Failures in Chile
Covid-19 has exposed the best and worst of countries. Indeed, the pandemic has laid bare, often times in painful detail, the strengths and weaknesses of our societies, leaders, economic systems
My Domestic Harvard Enclave
English + Español
I’m a first-year student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), yet I’ve never set foot in Cambridge as a student. I’ve been studying remotely from Argentina, and hope my experience
Our Family During Covid
Families in Brazil—and all over the Americas—face challenges during the pandemic. Those challenges for young people are even more apparent when your mother is a political scientist who studies and consults on the effects of the pandemic…
Building New Types of Conversations in Education During COVID-19
English + Español
As a student in the Master’s Program of International Education Policy at Harvard Graduate School of Education, I could not remain passive in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. I have
Exhausted Women
English + Español
We women are tired. Physically and psychologically. It is not just the fatigue due to the pandemic, or that of a particular context. It is historical fatigue, transmitted and accumulated,
El Pueblo Tiene La Fortaleza – The People Have the Strength
The chilly 8 a.m. sun made its way slowly in Washington, D.C, tiredly signaling a new winter day. It was Thursday, January 7, 2021, and less than 24 hours prior, my home city had
Brazilian Science under Attack
As a Brazilian graduate student, I am researching daily attacks scientists and professionals who defend evidence-based health have been suffering since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Solidarity through Community Dining Rooms: Olla común
A photo by Claudio Santana was chosen for the digital photo exhibition, “Documenting the Impact of Covid-19 through Photography: Collective Isolation in Latin America,” curated in collaboration with ReVista and the Art,
Women Leaders and Superior Covid-19 Performance
English + Español
You may have heard that women leaders steered their countries to better Covid-19 outcomes. This narrative emerged in the first months of the pandemic, as journalists observed that countries
A Year in Lima
English + Español
A cacophony of whispers and rumors circulated that Peruvians should prepare to quarantine at home for two weeks. A line stretched outside of the grocery store for nearly half a block. My
War of Images and Messages
My father was born in 1933 in Berlin in a Jewish family. I was born in Brazil and grew up during a military regime, one of the many Cold War South American dictatorships that counted on…
Religion: A Cultural Trait in Cuba
English + Español
With the arrival of the year 2020 and the accompanying Covid-19 pandemic, we could not imagine how much everything was going to change. What seemed to be daily
Letter from Puerto Rico
I have been working with the Latinx and Latin American LGBT community for more than 20 years, and teaching yoga and mindfulness to LGBT and Gender Queer Older Adults in Puerto Rico since 2018…
Entrepreneurship and Gender: Policies for Closing the Gap in the Covid Era
English + Español
As long-time researchers at INCAE Business School , we’ve found that gender discrimination in Latin American societies significantly reduces the effective participation of women in the
Manaus: Death in the Amazon
Manaus, a metropolis of more than two million inhabitants in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, suffered the lethal impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic like no other Brazilian city. Hospitals without…
The Challenges
Going out every day to capture the best story or photo is challenging. Photographing in this period in which we are living, even knowing the risks we are taking, is being able to inform the population, through images, of the reality we are facing, but in the least painful…
Finally I Had My Happy Ending!
English + Español
It is highly unusual to see the word “happy” in an article about Covid-19. However, what I’m referring to here is the way in which Finsocial—our fintech company dedicated to consumer credit and…
Changemaking in Argentina with DRCLAS
English + Español
I was incredibly excited at the prospect of spending last summer in Buenos Aires. Streetside tango, huge murals and barbeques overflowing with fresh steak seemed to provide the perfect
Education and Post-pandemic Reconstruction
English + Español
As someone who has followed international education for decades, I’ve seen that few issues generate more consensus than the belief that education is crucial for development. No country has achieved significant economic, social and political progress without expanding and…
Conducting Virtual Research for Argentina
English + Español
It might not be the way most college sophomores spend their Friday nights. Whether it was a high-stakes game of Jenga or just listening to how someone’s day had gone, I found that my experience
Saying Goodbye in the Midst of a Pandemic
English + Español
The Covid-19 pandemic has posed an enormous challenge, independently of one’s social group, playing havoc with many aspects of our lives, revealing the precariousness in which a great part of the world population lives, making visible the weaknesses in each country…
Vaccine Revolts
In the past eight months, conservative Brazilian politicians have invoked rights against public health mandates at least twice. In June, Congresswoman Carla Zambelli falsely claimed that a federal bill allowed “unconstitutional home invasions” to enforce mask usage inside…
Auto-Confinement
During a month of self-confinement I managed to understand how fragile we can be and what my true priorities are: protecting my family and continuing photographic work more personal and introspective, hoping that what I have experienced now is a lesson for…
Journeys
English + Español
The lockdown provoked by Covid-19 in Peru has left many people without an income, obliging tens of thousands of migrants in Lima to return home to their families in the Andes and the Amazon…
Forbidden Embrace
In 2020, the pandemic crisis has hit the Brazilian Amazon hard. Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to Covid-19 and its severe consequences, due to historical and socio-economic factors aggravated by the persistence of colonial practices in their native…
A Reflection on the Impact of Covid-19 in Latin America
English + Español
At the beginning of April 2020, in the middle of lockdown, my friend and colleague, Manuel Alcántara, and I started to discuss the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic might have in Latin America…
The Long Wait
English + Español
Mario Lorenzana, gravedigger at the “Jardín” cemetery in the municipality of Soyapango, in San Salvador, takes a brief break among the lush vegetation after performing a burial under Covid-19 protocols with her fellow gravediggers, during long and exhausting stints with…
The WhatsApp Experience
A relatively young commercial city of around 80,000 inhabitants in the Colombian vast oriental plainlands received about 18,000 internally displaced persons of the country’s longstanding
Beyond Indifference
English + Español
Mexico is intense; intense in living or in dying, in feeling or ignoring. I believe that all Latin America is that way, through a certain intangible but undoubtedly present brotherhood…
The Heart in the Vanguard
English + Español
These photographs were taken in the neighborhood where I was born, Altahabana in the city of Havana, Cuba. I went out to accompany medical students two days in a row, first, close to an hour going up and down five flights of stairs in two buildings with 30 different…
The Covid-19 Crisis and Populism in Brazil
English + Português
As a researcher in the history of the relationship between law and slavery, I’ve observed the impacts that biological events can have on the course of national policies. As historians like Sidney Chalhoub and Tana Hogarth have pointed out, yellow fever epidemics not only helped…
Gaming, Mexico and the Impact of Covid-19
English + Español
Covid-19, as we all know, has affected the world in surprising ways. It sent the gaming industry worldwide skyrocketing in 2020. It forced the hands of corporations to rethink their brick & mortar recruitment strategy, as the pandemic forced gamers worldwide to quarantine…