Working to understand … : COVID-19, polycrises and intersectionality

This paper developed from a keynote talk and discussion at the Annual RGS-IGB conference 2023. It draws on both authors’ work to examine how children work to understand their lives, identities and futures during global polycrises, particularly COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd in the US during the pandemic period. COVID-19 served to illuminate children’s geographies in both the global interconnectedness of children’s lives and the ways in which they are marked by intersections of space, place, racialisation, class, gender, nation, (dis)ability and ‘more-than-human’ entanglements. The paper builds on developing work in children’s geographies on intersectionality, hauntology and the posthuman. Its key contribution to the subdiscipline and wider childhood studies is to develop a combined psychosocial and more-than-human, ‘after childhood’ approach that foregrounds the shifting conditions of possibility through which children live, narrate and reimagine crises. It shows how the voices and lives of children in poverty, from minoritised groups and in the Majority World are frequently absent from dominant accounts of both pandemic and protest, fitting with a ‘normalised absence/pathologised present’ conceptualisation. The paper concludes with four provocations for geographically inflected childhood studies.