Browsing by Author "Suárez Ontaneda, Maka"

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    COVID-19: la multiplicidad de la pandemia del 2020 en el sur del Ecuador
    (Universidad de Cuenca, 2021-09-14) Chang, Fu Yu; Suárez Ontaneda, Maka
    This thesis explores the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 in a rural area of southern Ecuador. Combining ethnographic and biomedical data, participant observation, and through my own experience as a front-line physician during the pandemic, this thesis analyzes the multiplicity of COVID-19, understanding it beyond its biomedical reality and showing historical inequities in public care systems. In conversation with medical anthropology and science and technology studies, this thesis uses three approaches: a) it describes the production of statistical data through digital infrastructures, showing that they are not neutral. At the same time, it illustrates the connections between the data and the measures taken in the management of the pandemic; b) it relates the management of the pandemic to the inability to respond to disasters due to historical deficiencies in the public health system; and c) it details the improvisations that both professional and non-professional caregivers have had to devise to care for their patients.
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    Etnografía de los movimientos provida de Cuenca
    (Universidad de Cuenca, 2022-01-26) García Villarroel, Rommel Javier; Suárez Ontaneda, Maka
    What are the pro-life groups in Cuenca like? This thesis is an ethnographic study of three groups from the city of Cuenca. It looks to understand, from their points of view, how the pro-life activist groups are formed, what their concerns are, how they are organized, how they are alike and how they differ. Through a two-year face-to-face and digital fieldwork, this thesis explores the composition and organization of these groups, the particularities of each of them, and the communication strategies and pro-life activism during the decriminalization of abortion in 2019, legalization of equal marriage and the Martha case. This study contributes to an understanding of the complexity of spaces marked by shared beliefs but formed by very different activisms that try to build different spaces and realities. The lessons learned from this work open the opportunity to explore a poorly studied anthropological field in Ecuador.