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The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the reconversion experiences of four social organizations to sustain the social bond and collective care in popular neighborhoods of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA), Argentina, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on qualitative research work with an ethnographic approach, conducted remotely between July and September 2020, we i) reconstructed the social context and characterized the activities of the socio-community organizations studied in AMBA, before and during the pandemic; ii) sketched images such as the collective "la olla" organization, which describe the community provision of care; and iii) showed how, in the context of restricted movement, the organizations had to deploy tactics to "contain," "accompany" and take care of themselves and others. In line with debates about an economy of care, which produces values surreptitiously appropriated by the rest of the economy, this paper focuses on those resulting from socio-community practices related to: food --"la olla" and "la fila"--, health, and socio-affective --"containment"--. This proposal is intended to contribute to the theoretical-political field of discussion, in which it is situated, on the paradox between the centrality of (socio-community) care, for the production of social welfare, and its insufficient recognition in economic, social, and political terms. Methodologically, the paper portrays the challenges --for social research-- of reading and interpreting practices when co-presenciality is technologically mediated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of the agency of women who reside in the rural areas of the Argentine Pampas, based on their promotion and production of agroecological family horticulture. The recognition of these women's agency through care - care of their children, global care, and green care - offers a significant challenge to some metrocentric and Eurocentric feminist perspectives that claim care work can only be oppressive for women. The first of these types of care empowers women to improve the nutrition of their children. It also relates to another underlying type of care, which is to provide a sufficiently robust education as to ensure their children have a better and alternative future. The second type of care has the power to socially transform the territorial space of the district's countryside and its marginalized populations which, through care, acquire greater public and political attention. The third type of care empowers women to transform and care for the environment, and is exercised by not using pesticides in horticultural production and by disseminating knowledge on the matter. In line with discussions of postcolonial feminism (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Mahmood, 2001; Suárez Navaz, 2008), I argue that certain properties that are attributed to women relative to caregiving - by way of a dichotomous view of gender relations - fuel their agency: for these women the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats food, training and labor inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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