Our member, Dr. Tom Disney, and his co-editor, Dr. Lucy Grimshaw (both from Northumbria University, UK), talk about their edited collection, Care and Coronavirus: Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Family (Emerald Publishing, 2024).
The COVID-19 pandemic radically altered the everyday worlds of children, young people and families. Exploring their experiences and practices of care during this period, Care and Coronavirus: Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Family brings developments in the field of Childhood Studies into productive dialogue with care to forge new ways of thinking through care and childhood, youth and family.
Split into five sections, each bookended with a practitioner reflection, the chapters discuss how the pandemic engendered and necessitated novel forms of caregiving and experiences of receiving care. Highlighting changes to everyday norms and routines, contributors focus on diverse spaces of care and incorporate perspectives from children, practitioners, policymakers and academics. Investigating early childhood systems of care, children and young people’s health and wellbeing, parents as subjects and recipients of care, schooling as care and young people navigating care and control beyond school, authors offer key reflections for thinking through these experiences during the pandemic, challenging the inequalities and commodification of care that was revealed in these times.
Arguing that COVID-19 heightened the attention paid to care and the ways in which care is vital for the maintenance of ourselves and the world around us, Care and Coronavirus calls for a reflection on the failures and successes of care during the pandemic and in its aftermath so that we can plan for a more caring future.
The origins of this book emerged from our interests in how COVID-19 had fundamentally challenged how we think about care and its role in society. We wanted to push this further and explore how this had opened up new possibilities for Childhood Studies, such as exploring what the complex networks of relations, reciprocity and multidirectionality inherent in care might mean for childhood, youth and families in COVID times.
Care of children was often a central discourse during societal lockdowns, but children’s own care experiences, practices and relationships have tended to be neglected in policy and academic literatures, so we wanted to address this. Given that children and young people were often excluded from decision making and assigned an assumed vulnerable status, we were also really keen that young people themselves were included in the book, and across a couple of chapters young people are listed as contributors. In a similar vein, we encouraged practitioners who had been engaged in work with children, young people and families to share their narratives of caring during these times.
[The entire chapter is freely available to read here]
On 3rd January 2020, the BBC reported on a ‘mysterious viral pneumonia’ and concerns that this infection might resemble the flu-like SARS virus, which killed 700 people in 2002-2003 across the globe (BBC 2020). Within a month the situation had changed dramatically, and the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared the outbreak a global emergency. By 20th March, there had been 10,000 recorded deaths, with unofficial figures likely much higher, many countries began to lockdown borders and officially limit social contact between their citizens. What we now know of as Covid-19 is, according to the WHO (2024), officially connected to an excess mortality of at least 3 million people globally. We use the term ‘connected’ deliberately, because as Horton (2020: 874) notes, COVID-19 did not act in isolation but was made particularly deadly through its interaction with a range of non-communicable diseases that clustered in particular social groups ‘according to particular patterns of inequality deeply embedded in our societies.’ This avoidable context of social and economic inequality that allowed COVID-19 to particularly ravage certain communities, underscores the political nature of the pandemic. A common refrain during these uncertain times was ‘we are all in this together!’ yet when examining the impacts of the virus, exposure was deeply stratified across racialised and gendered lines with certain groups essentially positioned as ‘surplus populations’ (Tyner, 2013) pointing to the biopolitical nature of this pandemic. In addition, forms of state withdrawal and erosion of formal care services exacerbated community vulnerability to the virus. In the UK, for instance, a preceding decade of unrelenting and cynical austerity policies withered the state’s infrastructure and ability to protect its citizens. As Raghuram (2021: 865) argues these outcomes can be read as the ‘inheritance of uncaring economies and states.’ The necessity of care and the failure of its provision was starkly felt across the world. In amongst the horrors that were experienced throughout the pandemic, this period was also marked by hope; there was optimism that the intense shock of such a phenomenon might finally herald a change to the dominant capitalist system and precipitate a kinder, more caring form of governance (Mazzucato, 2020).
Today it can feel like the possibility of radical alternative futures that prioritise care has diminished, as countries across the world have now largely reoriented themselves back to business as normal; lockdowns have now ended, the virus has cemented itself into everyday life, having become endemic, and capitalism has retained its hegemonic position. If anything, the virus itself has now become a new means of accumulation, co-opted by capitalism, reflecting its tendency to cannibalise seemingly everything (Fraser, 2022). Despite this, there were moments, practices and experiences during the height of the pandemic, where care, and its potential, offered a glimpse into what might be or what could be if we were brave enough to radically alter our state of being and approach to care. It is this premise which is the inspiration for this edited collection; to understand care in the context of COVID-19, the practices, experiences and potential futures of it for children, young people and families. We argue that COVID-19 has fundamentally challenged perspectives on childhood and care, opening up important new possibilities for Childhood Studies.