Ways of governing street life during the pandemic: discourses, technologies, and practices

Abstract

Drawing on multiple sources, this article presents an analysis of a national survey implemented by Street Clinic teams in Brazil on the homeless population and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the lens of certain ethical-political principles and methodological decisions, we focus our analysis on discourses about who lives and works on the streets during the pandemic, connecting discourse with experience. From the perspective of governmentality and biopolitics, we seek to shed light on power relations that reveal modes of government embodied at the street level – mainly related to isolation measures and social distancing – to create tensions surrounding the emergence of the notion of the homeless population in the midst of the pandemic. We conclude with a discussion of the precariousness that circumscribes life on the streets as a shared condition, and search for ways to comprehend forms of resistance and the right to exist.