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precarious, exploitative work and finance. In this context, Pei and Chang report on a collaborative, youth-led action research project to ‘reinvigorate economic imaginations’ and ‘enact alternative economies’. They note the considerable regulatory and institutional barriers to enacting affirmative alternative futures, but also show how the project has been successful in constituting organisational change and new, more hopeful personal and collective orientations to the future. They note, however, the considerable work involved in making this kind of alternative space and future possible: all this was only possible because of significant collective actions.
In Chapter 16, Caroline Day considers the role of aspiration among caregiving and non-caregiving young people in Zambia. Day notes that youth-centred policymaking is relatively new and under-developed in Zambia, as in many other contexts. Day argues that better understanding of young people’s aspirations and senses of the future is crucial in formulating policies and programmes that support, or impact upon, young people. Drawing on a significant programme of qualitative research, the chapter explores the nature of the future aspirations of diverse, and often extremely marginalised Zambian young people. We draw considerable hope from Day’s key conclusion that, even in profoundly hard times, these young people’s aspirations were rarely selfish and individualised: instead, Day’s research participants overwhelmingly talked about aspirations in terms of caring relationships and responsibilities. These aspirations are full of care and love: for family members, friends, communities and older and young people. This sense of aspiring to care provides a hopeful and deeply affecting end point for the book.
In our concluding chapter we offer a series of reflections on the chapters and prompts for future research, reflection and practice. We hope, too, that the multiple, interrelated hard times witnessed through this collection will prompt readers to develop their own reflections, responses and ways forward with/in hard times.
Postscript: childhood and youth in COVID-19 times
We submitted this book manuscript in late February 2020. We were unaware that, within days, our lives, families, communities and workplaces would be radically transformed by the spread of the global COVID-19 (‘Coronavirus’) pandemic. This book is therefore an accidental record of time-spaces just before the impacts of COVID-19. All of the children, young people and families in this book are encountered in moments just before the pandemic. We cannot help but wonder how they are doing. We worry, profoundly, about how their lives, experiences and life-chances are being affected by COVID-19. Here and now, as we review the typescript in August 2020, this worry crystallises around five questions about childhood and youth in the context and aftermath of COVID-19.
1) How has COVID-19 affected children and young people’s everyday lives?
Here and now, it is too early to attempt a comprehensive overview of the impacts of COVID-19 for children and young people in diverse global contexts. (And, to be frank, our experiences of living and working through the COVID-19 pandemic are just too raw and too close right now for that kind of thinking; it feels important to record that we are not in particularly great places – emotionally, personally, professionally – as we write this, trying to make academic writing happen in spite of the familial, educational, workplace and emotional impacts of COVID-19.) But evidence is just starting to emerge of the complex, compound, poignant and wide-ranging ways in which COVID-19 has touched – and often profoundly impacted – children and young people’s everyday experiences (see the repository collated by RCPCH, 2020). We hope that future research and policy will notice, and empathise with, the many ways that COVID-19 has transformed children and young people’s everyday relationships, disrupted their routines, institutions and support networks, constituted new anxieties, precarities and caring responsibilities, and radically refigured families, friendships, work, education, technologies and everyday spaces in so many ways and in so many contexts.
2) How are impacts of COVID-19 intersecting with multiple inequalities and exclusions?
It is important to state explicitly that there has been no universal experience of childhood and youth in COVID-19 (maybe we should think about COVID-19s to signal the many lived experiences of this virus). Rather, children and young people have been differentially affected by COVID-19, in ways which map onto existing inequalities in ways that are only just becoming clear. In England, for example, deeply affecting statistics showing that COVID-19 mortality rates have been twice as high in deprived communities compared to affluent areas (Pidd et al, 2020), and disproportionately high among black, Asian and minority ethnic communities (BBC, 2020a), reveal a stark ‘hierarchy of precarity’ during the pandemic (Langford, 2020). Similarly, controversies over the UK government’s initial calculation of English school leavers’ attainment in lieu of exams, using an algorithm which manifestly advantaged smaller class sizes and schools’ previous exam results, have galvanised discussion about the extent to which experiences of COVID-19 have been patterned by structural inequalities (BBC, 2020b). Evidently, young people who were already diversely marginalised, precarious and at risk have been disproportionately exposed to COVID-19 risks and personal-political-economic fallout. It will be important for future research and policy to consider how multiple inequalities and exclusions have been compounded and hardened through COVID-19. We wonder, and worry profoundly, about how impacts of COVID-19 are intersecting with the kinds of gendered, classed, ableist, post-colonial, heteronormative, cis-normative and globally uneven modes of marginality and social exclusion evidenced through this book (see WBG, 2020; Brewer and Handscomb, 2020; European Commission, 2020). We fear that the complexly intersectional ‘hard times’ discussed through this book just got a lot harder, in all kinds of ways.
3) How are children and young people represented in media and policy discourses of COVID-19?
From our English perspective, we worry about the ways in which young people have repeatedly been represented in very particular, prominent ways in media and policy discourses of COVID-19. It seems to us that many media, political and social media discourses have fallen back on a default assumption that young people – particularly teenagers, perhaps particularly young men – are feckless, feral, amoral, irresponsible and anti-social. These kinds of discourses have been widely perpetuated via representations of, for example, young people defying ‘social distancing’ and ‘lockdown’ restrictions in pursuit of lairy, boozy, promiscuous, lawless, care-less lifestyles. (At this point, we had lined up some illustrative examples from outlets including The Sun, MailOnline, Daily Telegraph and Twitter. But we find that, right now, we are not really minded to give the oxygen of publicity to this sort of grim, divisive, exclusionary, trolling, culture war clickbait). These kinds of representations seem weirdly callous and toxic, and efface the precisely contemporaneous prominence of young people in community volunteering, familial and neighbourhood care work, and campaigning in support of social and environmental justice, LGBTQ+ rights and the Black Lives Matter movement. So we wonder, what can be learnt from representations of children and young people and COVID-19 in diverse contexts, beyond our UK media bubble, and what other, more hopeful cultural discourses and norms about contemporary childhood and youth might be possible?
4) How have neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises been compounded by COVID-19?
It is with considerable anxiety that we try to anticipate the impacts of COVID-19 for the processes of economic crises, austerities and neoliberalisations that have framed this book. The outlook is not good. Economically, global and national forecasts suggest that COVID-19 will have significant and enduring consequences which will haunt every one of the contexts described in this book (European Commission, 2020). At time of writing, the World Bank baseline forecast predicts