Children and COVID-19 Research Library

This project forwards insights about the importance of being in ‘the room where it happens’ – creating tactility and togetherness in the research encounter – for research with children and young people in times of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Created in response to the intense uptake of digital methods catalysed by COVID-19, this project productively re-imagines moments from our creative visual research with children and young people from before the COVID-19 pandemic. This re-imagining began early in 2020 and has continued to evolve, incorporating our shifting perspectives and ‘thinking with’ the scholarship of leading creative methodologists.

Since the beginning of the year, the world’s attention has rightly been focused on the spread of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the implementation of drastic mitigation strategies to limit disease transmission. However, public health information campaigns tailored to children are very rare. Now more than ever, at a time when some governments are taking populations out of lockdown and youth are returning to schools, children around the world need to fully grasp the modes of transmission of the disease, the health risks, the scientific notions of the immune system, the value of barrier measures, and the progress of scientific research. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, comics can be very useful for communicating quickly and effectively abstract and important information to children who might be under the influence of a large amount of sometimes contradictory information. Conveying precise, reliable, and accessible information to children is key in a world overwhelmingly impacted by the outbreak.