By Alexandra Abello Colak (and others)

More than a year on from the declaration of the pandemic in Colombia, COVID-19 has claimed more than 100,000 lives. Of these, 12.9% have been recorded in Antioquia1, the department with the second highest number of confirmed cases, and more than 5,000 people have died in its capital, Medellín, the second largest city in the country. But while the loss of life is one of the most horrific direct consequences of the pandemic, it is certainly not the only one. The global health crisis and the measures implemented to contain the spread of the virus have had profound economic, social and institutional impacts which need to be analysed in each context in order to understand the magnitude of the challenge that an appropriate, proportionate response to the pandemic in each city supposes. This report examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on some of the most populated and most vulnerable communities in Medellín. Monitoring conducted between April 2020 and February 20212 provides the basis for a contextualised analysis of what, to date, the pandemic has meant for broad sectors of the population. On the strength of this analysis, we argue that the public health crisis caused by COVID-19 has not only deepened and exacerbated historical problems which affect the lives and well-being of people; it has also led to a progressive and generalised surge in human insecurity in the city, which calls for a concerted, comprehensive, multidimensional, participatory strategy which acknowledges the differential impacts that the pandemic has had on different groups and can help mitigate the rise in threats and risks to human security.  

London: London School of Economics, 2021. 39p.

Edited by Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski.

Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control. Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research. We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.

London: Pluto Press, 2014. 225p.