Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

Volume 12, Issue 2

Winter 2020

Surviving a Pandemic

—Heather Snell

One could argue that children’s and young adult texts were more important than ever for young people sequestered in their family homes following the outbreak of COVID-19. The imaginary worlds offered up by books, films, TV shows, and video games, not to mention the plethora of stories authored by young people themselves, no doubt provided ample opportunity for escape from boredom, cabin fever, the frustration of emergency remote learning, and, in many cases, intolerable living conditions. Such cultural texts were possibly succour for young people whose experience of the family home bears more resemblance to an adult horror film than the romantic scenes of family bliss that appear in many children’s picture books. In a piece re-blogged on Bully Bloggers—“the queer bully pulpit you never dreamed of…”—feminist theorist Sophie Lewis comments favourably on the mutual aid that sometimes proliferated in the wake of the pandemic, but she problematizes the privileging of the home as a site of refuge and safety in a neo-liberal capitalist context in which many are either trapped in unsafe, domestic spaces. The rise in domestic violence during the pandemic and attempts on the part of initiatives such as Moms 4 Housing in Oakland, California, to secure self-isolation spaces for those who lacked it during lockdown laid bare in unforeseen ways the implications of being without a safe home. The contradiction between the peculiarly American idea of home as a family idyll—the characteristics of which include “the mystification of the couple form; the romanticization of kinship; and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe space that is private property” (Lewis)—has clashed spectacularly with the brute realities of the home since COVID-19 arrived in North America in March. The home is a space in which power is unevenly distributed according to gender, sexual orientation, and other registers of identity. Exacerbating these politics are the ableist, elitist, and racist systems that are frequently perceived to exist outside of the home but which actually penetrate it deeply, and often in violent ways. During pandemic lockdowns, it has become clear that those most susceptible to violence within the home are “[q]ueer and feminized people, especially very old and very young ones” (Lewis). Texts and cultures may mean little [end of page 1] when surviving difficult quarantine conditions is the number-one priority. The pandemic has simultaneously highlighted the importance of the kind of meaning-making we associate with culture and suggested their inadequacy for redressing the oppressive institutions in which people are embedded.

It is true, of course, that one can always choose virtual worlds when safe spaces are unavailable in the real world. The internet has proven to be a lifeline for many people throughout the pandemic. Returning for a moment to Lewis’s blog piece, remote interaction may have proven to be especially important for young people who identify as queer. For lesbian, bisexual, gay, trans, and other queer youth, virtual connection can mean the difference between feeling isolated and feeling supported. As the proliferation of hashtags designed to fill gaps in support for LGBTQ youth sequestered in homophobic homes on TikTok attests, feeling loved and supported became doubly important during quarantine. Many young people archived their experiences of being the only queer person in heteronormative households, and of having to pretend to be straight, under hashtags including #homophobichousehold and #homophobicfamilymembers. Young people who do not necessarily identify as queer used the TikTok platform to send messages of love and support to queer youth sequestered in homophobic households under hashtag series such as: #lgbt #queer #foryou.

Virtual connection has proven to be equally important for racialized young people in 2020, who, in the wake of the murder of Breonna Taylor—a Black woman who was shot in her Louisville home while in bed on 13 March—received a harsh reminder that the home is not necessarily synonymous with safety for them either. The murder of Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of Gregory and Travis McMichael while jogging on 23 February had already functioned as a stark reminder that even when engaging in physical activity outside the home, safety is not guaranteed for Black people. The McMichaels are White men who claimed to be making a citizen’s arrest. Many, including Democratic President-Elect Joe Biden, have identified the murder as one that recalls a long history of anti-Black racism in the United States. George Floyd and Tony McDade were killed by police roughly two months later, on 25 and 27 May respectively, demonstrating that Black people are not any safer in the hands of the state than they are in the proximity of fellow American citizens. For Black, Indigenous, and [end of page 2] other people of colour, the nation state can be experienced as hostile. The many incidents of violence against BIPOC in 2020 alone attest to the uneven distribution of safety within the nation. Social media has proven to be a crucial node of resistance for the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of these incidents. Young people used it to highlight the persistence of racism and to call for anti-racist action. A Black Lives Matter rally organized by Justice for Black Lives through social media occurred in my own city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on 5 June. The rally consisted of approximately fifteen thousand people, an extraordinarily large number for a Winnipeg rally. While the support for the Black Lives Matter movement led many to feel hopeful, some Black people in attendance felt that many Winnipeggers perceive racism to be something that occurs only south of the border (“Stop Lying”). On 6 June, the #ithappensinWinnipeg hashtag appeared on Instagram as a means of redressing this perception. The platform was immediately flooded with experiences of racism in Winnipeg, including by those who were current or former employees of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), the institution at which the Black Lives Matter rally and march had ended. The rapid proliferation of posts exposing the CMHR as a hypocritical institution led Thiané Diop—another former employee—to create the #cmhrstoplying hashtag on Instagram. Diop collaborated with two other former employees to organize another rally directed at the CMHR not long after. The momentum of this anti-racist movement has led to several more rallies in the city that address police violence against Black and Indigenous people. One of these called for anti-racist action in the wake of the police shooting of sixteen-year-old Eishia Hudson on 8 April. Hudson was one of three Indigenous people killed by police over eleven days in Winnipeg—Jason Collins was killed on 9 April and Stewart Kevin Andrews on 18 April. The creation of several hashtags devoted to archiving experiences of systemic racism at universities and colleges in Canada and the United States this year attest further to the important role that young people have played and continue to play online as our face-to-face encounters once more become primarily virtual as a result of a second surge of COVID-19.

Notwithstanding the importance of virtual connection at a time when social distancing remains a crucial line of defence against the virus, it is difficult for many to forgo their usual face-to-face encounters. This is especially true for those with little to no access to the internet. [end of page 3] For people in long-term care homes, quarantine means going without the family visits that help to provide meaning in their lives. Just as texts and cultures may mean little to people in intolerable living conditions “at home,” the promise of virtual connection, even if it is available, may mean little in institutional contexts. Family visits in perpetually understaffed long-term care homes also help to fill gaps in caregiving, so their absence has more serious consequences beyond alleviating feelings of loneliness. For those in carceral institutions, isolation is no doubt felt as extremely painful, especially in correctional institutions where humane treatment is not the norm. Young people make up a significant portion of incarcerated populations. Whether they are in refugee camps, detention centres, juvenile correctional centres, medical facilities, or other institutions where freedom of movement is either curtailed or non-existent, these young people must find ways to survive in spaces that might be experienced as hostile. Over the past several months, the mainstream media has had a lot to say about the plight of adults in correctional centres and long-term care homes, but far too little has been said about young people in youth correctional centres and other carceral institutions.

Too little has been said about the scarcity of touch in a world where virtual connection seems ubiquitous and democratic as well. As profoundly social animals, humans can find it difficult to survive for sustained periods without the salve of physical touch or, simply, the comfort of being in the proximity of another person. Tiffany Field, a developmental psychologist who founded the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami, reports that touch deprivation during childhood can lead to delayed growth and cognitive development; a propensity for violence in adulthood; insomnia; early onset arthritis, lower back pain, and fibromyalgia; suppressed immune responses; and an increased likelihood of cardiovascular disease (69, 74, 76, 77, 85). Social isolation—“an objective and quantifiable marker of reduced social network size and paucity of social contact” (Haj, Jardri, Larøi, and Antoine 8)—has also been found to have serious consequences for mental and physical health. In adults, it can disrupt long-term social memory (Liu, Lv, Wang, and Zhong 288); in children, it can increase the possibility of psychiatric illness as well as alcohol and substance abuse (Fosnocht, Lucerne, Ellis, Olimpo, and Briand 589). While many studies of social isolation involve experiments with mice and ants, when considered alongside research on touch, they suggest a strong [end of page 4] correlation between face-to-face encounters and human flourishing. Even when social isolation is desired and therefore experienced as beneficial, studies indicate that it leads to a reduced lifespan (Campagne 197).

In the case of people who experience loneliness—that is, “a distressing perceived discrepancy between one’s social desires and one’s actual interactions with others” (Lara, Caballero, Rico-Uribe, Olaya, Haro, Ayuso-Mateos, and Miret 1614)—the consequences are much more serious: among other effects, researchers observed cognitive decline manifest in decreased verbal fluency and delayed recall (1617). While it is assumed that young people more readily look to virtual connections, the abrupt disruption of face-to-face socialization can be felt as extremely oppressive for them as much as it can for older people who may feel more comfortable with face-to-face socialization. The various studies of the role that touch and socialization play in human life indicate that for many people sequestered in places where love and support are lacking or absent altogether, quarantine is likely not a simple matter of cabin fever, boredom, or frustration; in some cases, it may be a living nightmare from which there is little to no escape. Some people cannot even access the texts and cultures that may offer some distraction due to lack of appropriate technology, not to mention the revolving closures of bookstores, libraries, and schools. To what kinds of resources can they turn during a time of crisis, beyond, possibly, their capacity to build alternative worlds in which to shelter?

The frustration of not being able to socialize without the intermediaries of masks and screens has no doubt led many young people to gather in great numbers, provoking the ire of many adults in the process. The mainstream media has been quick to jump on them. During the early days of initial re-openings of the economy in Canada and, shortly after, in the United States, my news feeds were flooded with stories about young adults flouting social distancing rules in places such as British Columbia and Florida. As a quick internet search for “Spring breakers and COVID-19” reveals, during that cultural moment, the dominant image of North American youth began to consist of young adults cavorting on beaches and dancing in nightclubs. The rapid circulation of these kinds of images attests to the ongoing targeting of young people as disordered subjects who need to be controlled and regulated. The pandemic has brought into relief not just the racial, ethnic, and socio-cultural inequities of [end of page 5] society—inequities that have always been there but that “business as usual” had enabled many to ignore—but also the tendency among adults to engage in moral panics about young people, even when there is evidence of social apathy among older people. Many of the people protesting mask-wearing in Canada and the United States are older, and in Norway, “[t]hose who most often break quarantine and isolation are those over 50” (Stoksvik and Thomassen).¹ Normally, it is young people’s susceptibility to disease, violence, or so-called corruptive influences that make them a target of such panics; during this pandemic, however, it is young people’s relative lack of susceptibility to the virus that enables many adults to redouble their anti-youth rhetoric. That this rhetoric is accompanied by images of young adults partying on beaches and in nightclubs should come as no surprise, since these two settings have long been connected to discourses of juvenile amorality, disruption, and irresponsibility.

While it is undeniable that gatherings of young people have enabled COVID-19 to spread, it might be difficult for many of us teaching and researching in young people’s texts and cultures to take young people’s apparent irresponsibility in these instances too much to heart given the apparent need of many adults to pathologize youth. The story about reckless and hedonistic young people partying their way through a crisis ignores the many young people who are both adhering to social distancing laws and helping others in their own communities and beyond. Journalist Lauren Pelley suggests further that “younger Canadians may . . . be fueling the spread of COVID-19 in far more mundane ways [than the moral panics about overcrowded gatherings imply], with potentially dire consequences.” It is easy to blame spectacular events rather than the ones that many adults are attending—“cottages, family gatherings, dinner parties” (Pelley). As the calls for small Thanksgiving dinners on the part of health officials in Canada demonstrated, there are as many, if not more, infections resulting from these less media-worthy events. Olivia Bowden affirms that the primary spreaders are adults under forty but with the reminder that “[y]ounger people may also be working in precarious jobs where their exposure is increased, or where sick days may not be readily available.” They may even be college and university students self-isolating in student housing, where both touch and support networks may be scarce or unavailable. Young people are affected by the current crisis in different ways than older people. Among the deep conflicts [end of page 6] and contradictions the pandemic has exposed in unprecedented ways are intergenerational ones. In addition to these, the pandemic has laid bare the contradictions at the heart of neo-liberalism, notwithstanding its adherents’ desperate attempts to convince us that nothing is political.

Henry A. Giroux acknowledges the necessity of social distancing as a means of reducing the spread of COVID-19 but also recognizes that this necessary albeit estranging solution reflects the anti-social nature of American neo-liberalism: “There is a certain irony here in that the current White House call for the public to abide by social distancing mirrors not only a medically safe practice to slow down the spread of the virus, it also occupies a long-standing neo-liberal ideological space that disdains social connections and democratic values while promoting death-dealing forms of social atomization.” When US President Donald Trump rushed to relax social distancing in contravention of medical advice so that he could reopen the economy, “[i]rony turns into moral and political irresponsibility . . .” (Giroux). That a national leader can insist on social distancing while at the same time making it difficult to maintain in a reopened economy exemplifies the doublespeak of neo-liberalism. Contrary to the jingle that peppers government pandemic discourse in Canada, “we” are clearly not all in this together. On the contrary, the virus has become one more thing that individuals have to manage on their own, a task no doubt made more difficult by the absence of access to private helicopters, entire teams of doctors, and food couriers dedicated to helping with self-isolation—resources to which both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump had ample access during their own battles with the virus.

If there is anything to hold on to amid the great pain, suffering, and death caused by COVID-19, it is that the pandemic has exposed the cruelty of neo-liberal capitalism in a way that was not possible before. Having disinvested from the social for decades, and therefore ill-equipped (and in many cases unwilling) to adequately fill the breach left by the spread of the virus, governments have once again thrown massive numbers of people under the bus, many of them young—Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour; frontline workers; people with disabilities; people living in conditions of poverty; people in carceral institutions; refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants. Adult casualties include parents, teachers, [end of page 7] and elders living in long-term care homes. COVID-19 has drawn attention precisely to the lack of care that currently characterizes most regimes in a world governed by neo-liberal capitalism. The light at the end of the tunnel is perhaps the new and powerful surge of resistance that has emerged beginning in March, with the internet functioning as a crucial node of political mobilization even as it is being deployed to impose on us new forms of surveillance. Much of this surveillance is directed at young people, many of whom are being educated through online conferencing apps such as Zoom. Young people themselves are commenting critically on the effects of a virtual education and collaborating with older people to expose and challenge the divisive contradictions that characterize the neo-liberal landscape at a time when solidarity is desperately needed to curb the spread of COVID-19. Indeed, Giroux remarks that one of the positive outcomes of a crisis is “a resurgence of resistance movements at numerous levels willing to fight for a more just and equitable society.” The phrase “at numerous levels” is key, for if we are to imagine things otherwise, resistance cannot be solely the purview of older adults or elites in institutions that are themselves part of the problem. That said, the teach-ins that took place during Scholar Strike Canada provided some outstanding entry points toward rethinking institutions such as the university. Tellingly, the organizers and participants of these teach-ins were those most excluded by the university, namely, BIPOC. Notably, some of them were young, untenured scholars.

In this issue of Jeunesse, we include six articles that range from representations of well-being in children’s literature to decolonial, participatory research involving girls with disabilities in Vietnam. In “Flourishing in Country: An Examination of Well-Being in Australian YA Fiction,” Adrielle Britten and Brooke Collins-Gearing examine select young adult fictions that engage the hotly contested history of colonialism in Australia, arguing that they exemplify the potential of literature to transform profoundly racist societies into decolonizing ones by inviting readers to empathize emotionally with protagonists embedded in scripts and schemas that emphasize overcoming as opposed to social deficit and, concomitantly, survival rather than failure. Although this article was written before the pandemic, it speaks to current concerns about the well-being of young people at a time when their normal spaces of socialization have either become inaccessible or been radically altered to accommodate social distancing. That it is [end of page 8] being published in the wake of newfound calls for anti-racist action in the field of children’s literary studies is also a happy coincidence. Britten and Collins-Gearing engage the thorny issue of stories about Indigenous Peoples written by White authors, and the difference that identity makes when it comes to interpretation. Their article suggests that YA fiction can play an important role in shaping young people’s perception of the kind of society that might cultivate flourishing in all citizens, not just a select few.

Samira Nadkarni and Aishwarya Subramanian’s “Board(er) Games: Space, Culture, and Empire in Jumanji and Its Intertexts” explores twenty-first-century transmediations of the 1995 film Jumanji (adapted from Chris Van Allsburg’s 1981 picture book), arguing that despite appearances to the contrary, they ultimately reinforce its inherent colonialism. Nadkarni and Subramanian begin by noting that in its resemblance to the relationship between the real world of Brantford, New Hampshire, and the Jumanji board game at its centre, Jumanji exceeds the borders of its own filmic frame. In so doing, it exemplifies how culture is produced through the zones that lie in between texts. Nadkarni and Subramanian draw on Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of friction to make sense of this interplay. As with other cultural texts that overtly dialogue with texts that precede them, the destabilization of Jumanji through transmediation does not necessarily challenge its colonial structure, but rather, signals shifts in how American empire is managed culturally and for the apparent benefit of young people. Transmediations of Jumanji adopt a rhetoric of inclusion that suggests an innocuous, progressive slant on the 1995 film even as they reproduce its inherent colonialism. Nadkarni and Subramanian deftly position these texts within a longer history of the “gamification of empire,” showing that far from representing a departure from previous texts that feature young people entering other, fantastic worlds, they actually continue the cultural work of empire. In this way, they reflect the imperialist character of the board game itself, which is predicated on the mastery of space.

In “‘You Were Born with a Giant Silver Spoon in Your Mouth’: Geography, the Young, and Social Class in Finnish Films in the 2000s,” Tommi Römpötti argues that while cinema can challenge norms, it tends toward reproducing them. Two key twenty-first-century Finnish films exemplify this point in their use of binary oppositions to solidify class and gender structures. [end of page 9] Römpötti is particularly interested in the moment of crossing geographical divides, because they almost always reflect ideological ones. The films he takes up are therefore films in which young people embark on road trips, that involve border-crossing. Among other borders, Römpötti draws attention to the films’ depiction of Ring Road 3, which roughly separates rural from urban Finland. He shows that through editing, cinematography, and mise en scene, the films make much of this border, depicting it as one that divides urban consumers from country dwellers. The plot trajectories of the films supplement more formal elements in emphasizing the value of conformism to the ideals that circulate most robustly in Helsinki. As with much children’s literature, cinema featuring young people can function as invitations to pursue the benefits that supposedly accompany an embrace of dominant norms and values.

In “Entering the Chtulucene? Making Kin with the Non-human in Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s Starbound Trilogy,” Alena Cicholewski examines a science fiction (SF) trilogy that explores opportunities for flourishing among peoples living in disparate realms. The Starbound Trilogy features human characters who happen upon a community of critters called “whispers” while travelling through hyperspace. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Cicholewski explores the successes and failures of a serial SF work that envisions ethical relations between humans and non-humans for the benefit of a young adult audience. On the one hand, the trilogy ties the flourishing of humans and whispers to a multispecies collaboration that celebrates rather than downplays non-human agency; on the other, it appears to fall back on anthropocentrism in its privileging of the human. Cicholewski brings Haraway’s work into conversation with Victoria Flanagan’s and Walter Hogan’s to explicate the implications of this anthropocentrism at a time when climate change seems to demand radically different ways of looking at ourselves in relation to the various plant and animal agencies that surround us. Cicholewski’s article implicitly returns us to some of the concerns raised by Nadkarni and Subramanian about the imperialist structure of the Robinsonade as the characters find themselves stranded on a deserted planet. They are castaways when they encounter the whispers.

Philip Smith’s “Shakespeare Criticism and Performance in Children’s Literature: In Summer Light and Becca Fair and Foul” moves us from the resurgence evoked by Haraway’s [end of page 10] Chthulucene to divergence in its exploration of young protagonists who discover through their readings of The Tempest that Shakespeare’s works remain limited for understanding their selves and their worlds. Smith himself reads two texts designed for and marketed to young people against the grain of children’s literary scholarship, arguing that they diverge productively from the plot of The Tempest and the authority that has accrued to Shakespeare as a result of his inclusion in the Anglophone literary canon. Smith devotes the first part of his article to an overview of the use of Shakespeare in education before turning to the complex terrain of Shakespeare adaptation for young people. Drawing on the work of André Lefevere and Abigail Rokison-Woodall, among others, Smith shows that young people’s texts which engage Shakespeare do not necessarily reinscribe him as an embodiment of liberal humanism but rather as a powerful vehicle of critique. In the case of the two texts Smith analyzes, references to the famous playwright enable a foregrounding of the ways in which dominant scripts circumscribe the identity of young girls. Both In Summer Light and Becca Fair and Foul reference the critical history of The Tempest, from interpretations preoccupied with character to rigorous critique of the play’s power politics.

In “Whose Research Is It? Reflection on Participatory Research with Women and Girls with Disabilities in the Global South,” Xuan Thuy Nguyen likewise expresses a concern with girls’ empowerment but in an entirely different context. Moving from issues of representation to participatory research, she sums up the findings of a four-year, government-funded project entitled Transforming Disability Knowledge Research and Activism. The project aims to foster the inclusion of women and girls with disabilities in Canada, Haiti, South Africa, and Vietnam. The Vietnam portion of the project involved girls between the ages of ten and twenty-one from three different communities. To decolonize traditional research methods, the project recruited local women with disabilities to facilitate discussions among the girls, effectively transforming them into co-researchers. Twelve to fifteen girls from each community participated in the research over the course of three years. Borrowing Claudia Mitchell’s participatory visual methodologies approach and employing visual methods that included drawings and film, the project made visible the girls’ otherwise invisible experiences and provided opportunities for feelings of empowerment. Nguyen grounds the research in the kinds [end of page 11] of decolonizing methodologies advocated by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, stressing the importance of the “behind the scenes” work of research. She argues that this work, which includes building ethical relationships with co-researchers and the communities to which research participants belong, is as important as the data collected.

We include six reviews in this issue. Lois Burke assesses Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrave, and Carla Pascoe Leahy’s anthology Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives; Maria Alberto provides an overview and evaluation of four books about youth and celebrity; Jennifer Harrison examines Naomi Morgenstern’s Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics; Julia Lin Thompson reflects on Louie Dean Valencia-García’s Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism; Diane Sabenacio Nititham evaluates Lauren Heidbrink’s Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation; and Heather J. Matthews takes a look at three books that engage issues of race and representation. All books reviewed in this issue help to lay the ground for further research in the politics of ethnography, celebrity, post-humanism, resistance, and representation. As we look toward a world changed by a virus whose rapid spread significantly curtails face-to-face socialization, thinking on these topics is already changing radically. Some questions scholars are asking include the following: How will researchers engage in ethnographic research remotely? What are the implications of replacing physical, face-to-face engagement with virtual engagement for research? What new forms is celebrity taking with the recent explosion of TikTok as a highly popular social media platform globally? How will the pandemic change the way we communicate with each other through social media? Now that the internet is consuming more of our attention than it did before the pandemic, how will our notions of the post-human change? Does the pandemic gesture to the limits of post-human theory, or is such theory even more important now in a world where social distancing is driving people further and further into the virtual? To what extent is the virtual a carceral space? How does one continue to simultaneously use the internet as a node of resistance and resist the ways in which it is increasingly being used to monitor at-home work, proctor exam writing, and trace contacts?

In response to the first draft of this editorial, one of the Jeunesse editors reminded me that not everything has to be so focused on COVID-19. But as my own students have been [end of page 12] reminding me, it is almost impossible not to think about COVID-19. The very word “pandemic” has been transformed into an adjective that describes everything from teaching to theatre productions. How much longer we will have to do the pandemic is unclear, although the announcement of at least two effective vaccines offers some light at the end of the tunnel. What everyone thought would be a temporary period of social distancing has come to seem far more permanent. Thinking about what the measures we need to take in order to avoid spreading the virus mean in terms of how we think, live, and express ourselves is essential if we are to continue to resist the surge of fascism that seems to have gained momentum as a result of the outbreak. Many of us working in young people’s texts and cultures believe that thinking about the implications of the pandemic for young people seems urgent, since current measures promise to socialize them in radically different ways than in the past. It is my hope that we will not have to be so COVID-focused in the future, but rather that we will be able to turn our attention to constructing new ways of being that potentially combine our insights into virtual connectedness with our continued longing for face-to-face encounters. For now, the task of attending to the pandemic present overwhelms all else, not least for those of us struggling to teach remotely in a world where not every student can access the internet. Even as the pandemic has laid bare many social inequities and bolstered struggles for social justice, it has created larger divides. It will be up to those opposed to the rabid circulation of oppressive -isms—anti-Black and other racisms and fascisms, for example—to identify and articulate the places where thinking and action are needed to ensure that all may flourish in a post-COVID-19 future.

Notes

¹ I am indebted to Jennifer Duggan for this translation from the Norwegian.

Works Cited

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“‘Stop Lying’: Former Employee of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Speaks Out about Racism.” CBC News, Facebook, 13 June 2020, facebook.com/cbcmanitoba/videos/stop-lying-former-employee-of-the-canadian-museum-for-human-rights-speaks-out-ab/256862329067354. Accessed 13 Oct. 2020.

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