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This article reflects on the distance in anthropological research in urban contexts during the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina. On the one hand, physical distance has been at the center of the spatiotemporal regulations deployed by various agents to slow down infections and minimize the deleterious effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, while daily life in cities was rapidly transformed, these regulations -as a sign of the symmetry between daily life and anthropological research-made it difficult to make an anthropological approach based on proximity, prolonged stay, and even coresidence during fieldwork of the social experience of the pandemic to understand its differential impacts on urban life. Based on the results obtained in a set of collective explorations during the pandemic, the article reflects on distance as a product of social practices and a field of struggles both in urban life and in anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the daily mobility practices of the inhabitants of three unequal residential spaces in the city of La Plata: a traditional neighborhood of middle and upper classes in the center of the city; closed upper class neighborhoods located on the Buenos Aires-La Plata axis; and an informal settlement located in the southern periphery of the city. Then, mobility is the "methodological place" to explore the city and its meanings. The article seeks to problematize the ways of understanding the processes of social and spatial fragmentation by means of the identification of "conflicting centralities" where unequal social actors converge and interact, as well as "segregated circuits" in the specific ways of connecting residence, neighborhood, work, education, and leisure. In this regard, we argue that fragmentation refers not only to separation and distance between social groups but also to the ways in which interactions are established and encounters between them are processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article analyzes the relationship between urban borders and political imagination among popular sectors in contemporary Buenos Aires. On the basis of 100 qualitative interviews with leaders of social organizations from the 4 major regions of the city, different ways of comprehending and acting in particular spaces will be compared, and the role of urban borders and their relation to political processes examined. For this, the article focuses on the intersection between class, race, and ethnicity in the historical construction of urban borders in Buenos Aires. By identifying the tendency to naturalize and reproduce objectified social oppositions in a physical space as categories for perceiving and evaluating the social space, the article points up the relevance of local political matrices and neighborhood boundaries in the structuring of social bonds, local organizations, and political imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on an analysis of the urban experience of Bolivian migrants in Buenos Aires, the article problematizes habitual ways of thinking about the relations among territory, difference and inequality: the racial ghetto and the poor periphery. The articlepaper highlights the impossibility of understanding these processes on a unidimensional plane, and emphasizes the relevance of intersections of class, nationality, gender and "race" in the structuring and use of urban space. For this purpose, it analyzes not only the position and geographic location of migrants but also the logic of their circulation and social interactions within the space of the city, which both reproduce and challenge the frontiers that structure urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]