People-environment relations in the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil: contributions from a critical Latin American Environmental Psychology

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed several sectors of society in the face of the urgent need to rethink people’s relations with their surroundings. This article proposes a possible framework for reading the person-environment relations in the pandemic context, considering the Brazilian scenario. Our argument focuses on analyzing the spatialization of social and racial inequalities, determining factors for the spread of COVID-19, and the differences in its impacts, parallel to other readings that environmental psychology has presented for this context. We assume that more traditional approaches have limitations for understanding Latin American specificities, requiring revisions and reorientations of a theoretical-epistemological character and an ethical-political nature. In the end, we outline some propositions, from a critical perspective.