With Julie Spray (University of Galway) and Jean Hunleth (Washington University in St. Louis)

Amidst the pandemic chaos of 2020 we asked, where have all the children gone? In our podcast that year for AAA’s Raising our Voices we drew attention to children’s silencing in COVID-19 policy and media reports, speculated on the consequences of children’s erasure, and drew from the anthropology of childhood to suggest how we might think about and un-silence children’s experiences of the pandemic. Two years on, we this time ask: where have all the children been? We share our observations from our own studies with children in urban and rural U.S and New Zealand to piece together a story of pandemic childhoods that extends beyond public constructions of children as risks, vulnerable, and suffering. Reporting on comic-making with Auckland children during Delta and Omicron outbreaks, Julie Spray shares how she learnt to think of children as public health promoters as part of her Pandemic Generation study. Jean Hunleth reflects on how young people illustrated care giving and receiving during COVID-19 in her photographic study, Picturing Health by Rural Adolescents in the MidwEst (PHRAME). In particular, we ask: what have children contributed to families, communities, and nations during the pandemic? We highlight the unseen caregiving and self-care work, health promotion activities, and labor that children and young people have engaged in towards multiple dimensions of pandemic survival. We highlight new methods for accessing children’s lives during times of crisis and physical distance. And we underscore the importance of visibilizing children’s contributions, both to acknowledge the value of children’s work to society, and to create policy that better supports the realities of children’s lives.

LINKS
 
THE PREQUEL https://soundcloud.com/julie-spray/where-have-all-the-children-gone-the-silencing-and-un-silencing-of-children-in-americas-pandemic

Op-Ed on Pandemic Schooling:  https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-coronavirus-school-children-20200825-usduxuwjwbcntfx6wy5tra2dsy-story.html

Max Liboiron, “Exchanging,” in Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research. Ed. Kat Jungnickel. (MIT Press, 2020). 95. 

Jean's Team's Zine:  https://issuu.com/hunlethlab/docs/play_as_a_mode_of_research

Lola's Comic:  https://juliespray.com/pandemic-generation/pandemic-generation-comic-gallery/#Lola

IMAGE CREDITS:
"Chicken Wing Getting the Shot" by Clarissa Gaona Romero
"Lola Making Her Comic" by Julie Spray
Excerpt from Lola's comic, by Lola

BIOS

Julie Spray is an interdisciplinary medical and childhood anthropologist who researches children’s perspectives on health and illness, public health policy and interventions, and health inequalities.  Her focused on intersecting issues of rheumatic fever, asthma, stress, infrastructure, nutrition, self-harm, mental health, Covid-19, and health policy. She is currently a Lecturer in Children’s Studies at the University of Galway in Ireland and a Research Fellow in Social and Community Health at the University of Auckland. She is author of The Children in Child Health: Negotiating Young Lives and Health in New Zealand (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, 2020).

Jean Hunleth is a medical and childhood anthropologist bringing qualitative, ethnographic and arts-based methods and knowing children as fully activated human beings to American public health. Her research focuses on care, generational interdependencies and health in Zambia and urban and rural United States, and she has engaged with diverse global health issues including TB, HIV, asthma, cancer, and implementation science. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She is the author of Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight Against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, 2017).

Where have all the children been? Children’s unseen contributions to pandemic survival

As childhood medical anthropologists in America’s pandemic, Drs. Julie Spray and Jean Hunleth see children’s issues everywhere — school re-openings; mental health concerns; medical risks — but children themselves have been, to our ears, conspicuously silent. Instead, we encounter the taped-up playgrounds, street chalk drawings, and child-sized masks, the material evidence of childhood’s social reconstruction and the unheard voices of children themselves. In an adult-centric society that constructs children as vulnerable or risky, we observe a systemic silencing of children’s perspectives even in matters that directly affect them—contrary to the principle of participation core to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Through our research, we have learnt from children in New Zealand and Zambia that we cannot understand children’s needs and account for them in policy if we haven’t heard their perspectives. In this podcast, we bring together our respective perspectives as anthropologists of childhood and infectious disease and as people walking physically and metaphorically through this world. We ask: How are we thinking about childhood? What, and why, aren’t we hearing from children? What can anthropological lenses help us to understand about how childhood is being reconstructed and experienced in the COVID-19 era? How can we hear and interpret children’s perspectives? 

We share how anthropologists are raising our voices to contend with children’s media representations and shape the policies that affect them—and the responses to our efforts. And, we reflect on what anthropology as a discipline can learn from the anthropology of childhood’s longstanding study of children’s silencing and un-silencing.

This podcast was produced as part of Raising Our Voices 2020, from the American Anthropological Association.

References:

‘Commentary: Has anyone asked the children about pandemic schooling?’ Julie Spray and Jean Hunleth. News opinion piece, The Chicago Tribune, 25th August 2020. https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-coronavirus-school-children-20200825-usduxuwjwbcntfx6wy5tra2dsy-story.html

Spray, Julie, and Jean Hunleth. 2020. “Where Have All the Children Gone? Against Children’s Invisibility in the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Anthropology Now In Press.

Hunleth, Jean. 2017. Children As Caregivers: The Global Fight Against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Spray, Julie. 2020. The Children in Child Health: Negotiating Young Lives and Health in New Zealand. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvvh85fc.


Hunleth, Jean. 2019. “Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (2). https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.2.01.

Hunleth, Jean. 2011. “Beyond on or with: Questioning Power Dynamics and Knowledge Production in ‘Child-Oriented’ Research Methodology.” Childhood 18 (1): 81–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568210371234.

Spray, Julie. 2020. “Children’s Accommodations for Resilience in Uncertain Times.” NEOS 12 (2).

Spray, Julie. 2019. “Ghosts in the Playground: Small Talk of Death in Everyday Childhoods.” In Death Down Under: Twenty-First Century Dying, Death, Disposal, and Memorialisation in the Antipodes, edited by Ruth McManus, Jon Cornwall, and Sally Raudon, 23–43. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

Spray, Julie. 2020. ‘Towards a Child-Centred Public Health: Lessons from Rheumatic Fever Prevention in Aotearoa New Zealand.’ Children & Society 43(6): 552-566. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12389.

Spray, Julie. 2020. “Writing for and to the Public: Comment on Alma Gottlieb’s ‘Writing about Children for a Public Forum’ [Invited Peer Commentary].” Public Anthropologist 2: 66–68.

Spray, Julie. 2018. “The Value of Anthropology in Child Health Policy.” Anthropology in Action 25 (1): 29–40.

Julie Spray

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