Session Information
05 ONLINE 36 A, Care, Crisis and Covid-19
Paper Session
MeetingID: 818 3065 2659 Code: pa6kX0
Contribution
Youth has long been theorized in relation to notions of crisis, both in psycho-social individual terms as well as in socio-anthropological collective terms (Feixa, 2020). The Covid-19 sanitary crisis has reshuffled the ways in which youth as crisis is experienced in the present time, pointing to a major negative impact on the structural components that define individual experience. Both educational equity (Conto et al., 2021, Mitescu-Manea et al., 2021, Kende et al, 2021, Schuurman et al., 2021) and young people’s wellbeing (Donoso & Retzmann, 2020) have largely been affected. On the other hand, the ways in which young people can navigate the transition to adulthood has been transformed by health measures aimed at mitigating the drastic health consequences of the pandemic. Adolescence as an age of appropriating and exploring public spaces (Andersson et al. 2019), away from disempowering hierarchical domestic spaces (Childress 2004) has seized to be an option for many adolescents. Thus the configuration of the relationships between the present crisis and adolescence or youth as a period of personal, normative and social crisis deserves to be studied.
The proposed paper approaches this transformation by looking at the ways in which adolescent young people in a high-school in an economically disadvantaged city have experienced the Covid-19 pandemic. The research methods used involved on the one hand, photovoice methodology (Wang & Burris, 1997), and on the other hand, focus groups directed at group biographies and biographical narratives of the pandemic. The participatory research methodology allowed young people to reflect both individually and collectively on their experiences in this period of time.
Although currently, the data produced as part of these workshops is still being analyzed, the preliminary results point to a transformation of the ways in which the present context shaped individual experiences. This amounted to an individualized experiences of personal crisis characterized by disconnection, loneliness and isolation, as well as decreasing mental health and wellbeing. Connected to these challenges was also a revalorization of the relationship with other household members, including domestic animals.
On the other hand, there was also an experience of a collective crisis connected to the normativities of restriction measures which sometimes went hand in hand with the rules of the domestic household or contradicted these rules. Young people who sought to oppose the limitations that these measures imposed on their possibilities to explore spaces and connect socially were experienced as a normative crisis. In dealing with this crisis, young people either sought to subvert restrictions through mundane everyday struggles akin to those described by James Scott (1985) as weapons of the weak or through forging strategic alliances with other family or households members. In both instances, what was being challenged was not the usefulness of restrictions per say but their effects on everyday life: thus outdoor parking lots of supermarkets hidden from the passing eyes of police in cars became meeting places for the young people, as did the (officially closed) courtyards of schools that were closed to face-to-face education. These mundane practices, allowed young people to become emancipated in their quest for experience from their domestic spaces and relations. On the other hand, in some cases young people and their family members chose to venture outside their domestic spaces together thus contributing to the strengthening of household bounds - in this respect the normative crisis of adolescences in relation to parental norms did not play out in regard to restrictions.
Method
The present study was part of the kick-off phase of a youth-led participatory action research project (Ozer,2017; Ozer & Piatt, 2017; Ozer et al 2013) and was aimed at creating a reflective and participatory space in which young people would discuss their experiences during the pandemic and identify problems that needed to be addressed through action, especially in relation to wellbeing and equity. The wider framework for this action was a project funded by the Faculty of sociology and Psychology of the West University of Timișoara aimed at Promoting Equity and Wellbeing in Schools in Disadvantaged Communities (PESSCA). The four-day kick-off seminar of the PESSCA project took place in a face-to-face format in late September 2021 in a high-school in a socio-economically disadvantaged urban area in North-West Romania. The activities involved 14 female and male adolescents as research participants by inviting them to actively document and reflect upon their experiences throughout the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of participatory methods. The high-school students (aged 15-18) signed up voluntarily to participate in the hybrid project that involved a face-to-face kick-off seminar and a follow-up online program. During the kick-off seminar a series of workshops were carried out. Relevant to the present paper are (1) a photovoice workshop (Wang & Burris, 1997) in which young people documented visually and presented their experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of their sense of wellbeing and (2) a collective biography focus group that included the 14 participants AND a set of 4 focus groups with 4-5 participants about their personal experiences during the pandemic. Both workshops created a space of active learning (Wright, 2015) in which young people researched and reflected upon their surroundings identifying the challenges they and others have experienced during this time. Different forms of data have emerged through this complex process of data collection of which relevant for the present inquiry are: visual data (photographs and collages made by the participants; visual biographic representations made by participants) and textual data in the form of transcripts of recorded group interviews and discussions. Currently, we are in the process of processing and analyzing data, so that the presented interpretations and conclusions are preliminary.
Expected Outcomes
In conclusion, while the sanitary crisis and its biopolitical implications affected the social and educational contexts of young people amounting to a collective health crisis, the present times also saw the emergence of a reconfiguration of how the present crisis is experienced within the crisis of youth. In this respect, the ways in which the relationship between domestic and public spaces and the people and non-human others that inhabit these spaces, as well as with the normativities of adult family members and those of sanitary restrictions were configured shaped a new way in which adolescence as crisis is being experienced at the present time. From a different angle, discussing the present experiences of the pandemic with young people in a participatory manner created a space in which individual and personal narratives of crisis became part of collective knowledge thus enhancing the young people’s orientation and potential for agency in relation to similar experiences of crises in the future.
References
Andersson, B., Y. Mengilli, A. Pohl, and C. Reutlinger. 2019. “You can’t be up there”–youth cultural participation and appropriation of space. Diskurs Kindheits-und Jugendforschung/Discourse. Journal of Childhood and Adolescence Research, 14(1), 5-6. doi: 10.3224/diskurs.v14i1.01 Childress, H. 2004. Teenagers, territory and the appropriation of space. Childhood, 11(2), 195-205. doi: 10.1177/0907568204043056 Conto, C. A., Akseer, S., Dreesen, T., Kamei, A., Mizunoya, S., & Rigole, A. (2021). Potential effects of COVID-19 school closures on foundational skills and Country responses for mitigating learning loss. International Journal of Educational Development, 87, 102434. Donoso, V. & Rethmann N. (2020) The impact of the Covid-19 crisis: Is online teaching increasing inequality and decreasing well being for children? London School of Economics blog. Available https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2021/01/20/the-impact-of-the-covid-19-crisis-is-online-teaching-increasing-inequality-and-decreasing-well-being-for-children/ Feixa, C. P. (2020). Identidad, juventud y crisis: el concepto de crisis en las teorías sobre la juventud. RES. Revista Española de Sociología, 29(3), 11-26. Kende, Ágnes, Messing, V., & Fejes, J. B. (2021). Hátrányos helyzetű tanulók digitális oktatása a koronavírus okozta iskolabezárás idején. Iskolakultúra, 31(2), 76-97. https://doi.org/10.14232/ISKKULT.2021.02.76 Mitescu-Manea, M., Safta-Zecheria, L., Neumann, E., Bodrug-Lungu, V., Milenkova, V., & Lendzhova, V. (2021). Inequities in first education policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis: A comparative analysis in four Central and East European countries. European Educational Research Journal, 20(5), 543-563. Ozer, E. J. (2017). Youth‐led participatory action research: Overview and potential for enhancing adolescent development. Child Development Perspectives, 11(3), 173-177. Ozer, E. J., & Piatt, A. A. (2017). Adolescent Participation in Research: Innovation, rationale and next steps. Florence, Italy: UNICEF Innocenti Office of Research. Ozer, E. J., Afifi, R., Gibbs, L., & Mathur, R. T. (2018). Youth Engagement and Participation: Field-Building Across Research and Practice. Journal of Adolescent Health, 63(6), 671-672. Schuurman, T. M., Henrichs, L. F., Schuurman, N. K., Polderdijk, S., & Hornstra, L. (2021). Learning Loss in Vulnerable Student Populations After the First Covid-19 School Closure in the Netherlands. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 1-18. Scott, J.C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health education & behavior, 24(3), 369-387. Wright, D. E. (2015). Active learning: Social justice education and participatory action research. Routledge.
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