Super-Spreaders or Victims of Circumstance? Childhood in Canadian Media Reporting of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Critical Content Analysis

This qualitative research study, a critical content analysis, explores Canadian media reporting of childhood in Canada during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Popular media plays an important role in representing and perpetuating the dominant social discourse in highly literate societies. In Canadian media, the effects of the pandemic on children and adolescents’ health and wellbeing are overshadowed by discussions of the potential risk they pose to adults. The results of this empirical research highlight how young people in Canada have been uniquely impacted by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Two dominant narratives emerged from the data: children were presented “as a risk” to vulnerable persons and older adults and “at risk” of adverse health outcomes from contracting COVID-19 and from pandemic lockdown restrictions. This reflects how childhood was constructed in Canadian society during the pandemic, particularly how children’s experiences are described in relation to adults. Throughout the pandemic, media reports emphasized the role of young people’s compliance with public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and save the lives of older persons.

Narrative Inquiry as a Relational Methodology

The authors present an overview of narrative research and focus primarily on narrative inquiry, highlighting what distinguishes this approach from other research methods. Narrative inquiry allows scholars to go beyond positivism and explore how research can be conducted based on participants' stories, rather than using a purely scientific methodological approach. This research method acknowledges and honors narrative truths and provides a scholarly framework that makes space for voices often marginalized or excluded when dominant narratives and/or data hold a prominent place in a research agenda. As such, narrative inquiry can be used in academic research to challenge the status quo, thus harnessing research to stretch beyond hegemonic ways of being and knowing. The authors provide a robust overview and conceptualization of this approach, along with foundational concepts and exemplars that comprise this method of research.

A minor theory of direct action politics and performance in New Orleans’ economic justice movement

In this paper, I develop a minor theory that blurs boundaries between prefigurative direct action and symbolic performance to reconsider strategies for resistance and world-building. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of economic justice organizers and activists in New Orleans in 2015, I examine two events through this minor theory: an immigration reform protest and a collaboratively written skit about income inequality. By emphasizing the performance of protest and the potential for protest through performance, I consider how these events empowered activists to make claims on spaces of the city, develop long-term embodied solidarities, disrupt dominant narratives, and en act more just alternatives. These events took place against the backdrop of intensifying racial and economic inequalities in post-Katrina New Orleans, following a long history of both repression and resistance in the city. Through performance-based direct actions, New Orleans’s economic justice movement moves beyond a reactive politics rooted in outrage and anguish toward a direct action politics constructive of a more just world.

Ending Christian Hegemony: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Ends of Eurocentric Thought

This essay addresses Jean-Luc Nancy’s “deconstruction of Christianity” and how what Christianity proclaims through enacting a deconstruction of itself brings an end to the western, hegemonic hold that Christian imperialism has perpetuated for centuries. Nancy, for his part, takes up the name of Christianity insofar as it is a religious phenomenon that signals a trajectory of thought in the West that must be discerned as providing an “exit from religion and of the expansion of the atheist world.” Since deconstructing the dominant narratives of the West means deconstructing the myth of a sovereign, autonomous deity whose reign, Nancy declares, has reached its end, Christianity utilizes its own kenotic narrative to point toward the end of religion and Eurocentrism at the same time.

Sociality, resilience and agency: how did young Australians experience online learning during Covid-19?

In 2020 when schooling was abruptly reconfigured by the pandemic, young people were required to demonstrate new capabilities to manage their learning and their wellbeing. This paper reports on the feelings, thoughts and experiences of eight Year 9 and 10 students in NSW and Victoria about the initial period of online learning in Australian schools that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond dominant narratives of vulnerability and losses in learning, our participants offered counternarratives that stressed their capacities to rise and meet the times. We trace three central themes on how they: found moments of agency that increased their confidence, reconfigured resilience as a socially responsible set of practices, deployed sociality as a resource for the benefit of themselves and others. The pandemic opened up conversations with young people about where and how learning takes place and how schools might adapt and respond to young people’s growing sense of urgency about the future of schooling.

A conversation with a stranger: Debunking religiosity and poverty in South Africa

My previous research explored narratives and discourses from marginalised migrants in their quest for survival. This contribution approached the South African context through the lens of the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 ‘Ending poverty in all its forms’ and employed John Hick’s notion of ‘soul-making’ to analyse themes that emerged from a summary of a conversation with a stranger. Faith in God, forgiveness and vulnerability are thematically discussed within the context of the struggle for survival through a conversation held with a homeless man in Sinoville, Pretoria, on 03 August 2021. Inspired by this conversation, the article highlights religious expressions of the homeless, their vulnerability and their perceptions of God to contend that some of the homeless prayerfully deploy religiosity and seek God’s guidance to practise Christian values in their daily lives to survive on the margins of society. The contribution challenges dominant narratives on poverty in the context of homelessness and religiosity. The contribution concludes that current developmental discourses need to be decolonised to promote new models for ‘development from below’ which appreciate the role of religion and promote participation of the marginalised in local development initiatives.Contribution: This research contributed to the UN SDG 1 on ending poverty in all its forms by interrogating the vulnerability and religious narratives of homeless people in South Africa through the story of an encounter with a homeless stranger.

Negotiating the Digital Vā: Emerging Pacific Scholars and Community Building on Twitter

Although the power of social media to bring people together across borders is acknowledged, very little has been written about the potential of social media sites for emerging Pacific scholars living transnationally across our region and beyond. We deploy thematic talanoa to demonstrate how emerging Pacific scholars engage Twitter as a platform where routes and relationships are established and teu/tauhi in the digital vā. Furthermore, we argue that emerging scholars of Pacific heritage are building an augmented reality founded on Pacific-specific ways of relationship building, forming external to, and in response to, marginalising dominant narratives inside and outside Pacific worlds.

The effect of the Pandemic on European Narratives on Smart Cities and Surveillance

This paper presents the analysis of European smart city narratives and how they evolved under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic. We approach the smart city concept from the critical perspective of surveillance capitalism, as proposed by Zuboff, to highlight the growing privacy concerns related to technological development. We have collected and analysed 184 articles regarding smart city solutions, published on social media by five European journals between 2017 and 2021. We adopted both human and machine coding processes for qualitative and quantitative analysis of our data. As a result, we identified the main actors and four dominant narratives: regulation of AI and facial recognition, technological fight with the climate emergency, contact tracing apps, and the potential of 5G technology to boost the digitalisation processes. Our analysis shows the growing number of positive narratives underlining the importance of technology in fighting the pandemic and mitigating the climate emergency. Although the discourse on surveillance is often accompanied by the consideration of the right to privacy, those types of concerns are central for only two topics out of the four we discovered. We found that the main rationale for the development of surveillance technologies relates to the competitiveness of the EU in the global technological rivalry, rather than increasing societal wellbeing or safeguarding the transparency of new policies.