Exceptional childhood and COVID-19: Engaging children in a time of civil emergency

Introduction

In March 2020, during the earliest days of the declared COVID-19 pandemic, leaders from a number of countries of the Global North drew international media attention for their outreach to children affected by emergency measures implemented to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the disease). Themes recurrent across some or all of these public overtures included, among other things, expressions of empathy and words of reassurance for the fearful, acknowledgement of the significant disruptions felt in all aspects of everyday life, and appreciation for children’s efforts to adapt to the demands and deprivations wrought so suddenly by the onset of crisis. Most salient, perhaps, all appealed to children to contribute in various ways towards overcoming the crisis. Whatever the particulars of their own messages, each such occasion on which a figure of political authority made a point of speaking to or engaging with children on the pandemic and on their roles in collective efforts to address it is noteworthy in itself inasmuch as direct outreach to children on matters of pressing public concern is not a usual part of state practice. Throughout the Global North, and frequently in the Majority World also, the more familiar approach to children in connection with the exercise of sovereign power and its projects is their framing as cherished objects of protection. Sentimentalized and deployed as metonyms or allusions to imagined futures, they regularly figure in political rhetorics of all sorts, but seldom are children themselves addressed as bona fide subjects in and of a present moment in the sociopolitical lives of nations. While analogous efforts to mobilize citizens in aid of sovereign power may be relatively rare, it is rarer still for them to be addressed to children: calls to vigilance against the threat of terrorist attacks (such as the ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaigns in Canada and the U.S.), for example, have not specifically targeted outreach to children in the same way (though, interestingly, similar and simultaneous campaigns around the more delineated scourge of school shootings have). The peculiar phenomenon of leaders making efforts to engage children directly in the context of COVID-19, then, if not altogether unprecedented, is nevertheless sufficiently curious to call for reflection and some preliminary propositions about its sources and implications.

On first gloss, it may be tempting to draw inferences here about a putative recognition of children’s political subjecthood and perhaps to consider the relevance for debates about childhood and citizenship. Certainly, there is much to recommend inquiry along these lines and to imagine reason for at least some cautious optimism that we might be witness to an historical opening for progress on children’s participation rights. After all, even leaving aside the important gestures of some prominent political figures of the adult world, there is no shortage of examples of children having drawn notice for undertaking their own interventions in support of communities in crisis under COVID-19, whether ad hoc or in joining larger movements. As Italy’s healthcare infrastructure was overwhelmed by the pandemic and the country was forced into a nationwide lockdown, Italian children began hanging drawings of rainbows in the windows of their homes together with the words ‘Andrà tutto bene’ (everything will be fine). Both a symbol of hope for better days awaiting beyond the emergency and a form of children’s own contribution to more immediate community wellbeing, a proliferation of rainbow drawings soon appeared in windows in other countries as well. In this and myriad other ways – many of them covered in the press and shared widely on social media – children have not merely endured the effects of crisis but have found ways to take purposeful action in response to it.

Of course, children’s contributions to the social worlds they inhabit are neither new nor limited to moments of acute crisis. And while it is true too that even sovereign power occasionally evinces recognition of children’s political subjecthood, this tends to be limited to situations where it is framed as a social problem or is understood to be vested in the person of some prominent individual child, like a Naomi Wadler or Greta Thunberg – thus qualified and contained, so too is any challenge it might raise to quotidian practices in the governance of childhood. What is conspicuously out of the ordinary in the context of COVID-19 responses is the sudden attentiveness to children as an aggregate category of important social actors by those who wield sovereign power and the apparent willingness to suspend forms and practices of the governance of childhood that otherwise work to hold children’s fuller social and political subjecthood in deferment. Such precipitous change stands out from the more piecemeal progress on children’s participation in recent decades. In what follows, I draw from the puzzle of this apparent rupture in arguing that how childhood is imagined varies not only across wide geographical spaces or the longue durée (Braudel, 1958) of histories, but responds also to the exigencies of crisis. Where the latter shifts differ, however, is in their contingency upon the state of emergency, by dint of which they can be occasioned much more swiftly than the typically more glacial pace of social norm transformation. What is more, this contingency suggests that what might seem to herald reimagined norms governing childhood is more likely to be coterminous with the emergency and consequently imbued with little emancipatory potential. In this sense, it constitutes a form of exception (Schmitt, 1985) in which sovereign power abjures from usual practices in the governance of childhood to instantiate children’s subjecthood in the call for them to perform particular civic duties as part of a larger social mobilization in response to emergency. This suggests incipient breaches are best regarded as such and, at least as yet, not as reliable harbingers of more revolutionary change.

When leaders say the darnedest things

As theorized by Carl Schmitt (1985), the exception involves the substitution of sovereign authority for legal norms in response to extraordinary circumstances that norms cannot anticipate and to which they are consequently ill-equipped to respond. Inapposite to dealing effectively with states of emergency, the law in liberal social orders must therefore yield to society’s immediate needs and to the assumption of extraordinary power by the sovereign authority in order that crises are effectively addressed. Though Schmitt was concerned with legal norms, the idea of the exception offers a useful way to think about instantiated child subjecthoods in the context of COVID-19. Drawing from and applying this logic more broadly, we can see how, through constitutive speech acts under the state of emergency, sovereign authority may suspend not only legal norms but social norms also. Among these are normal practices of the governance of childhood wherein children are neither imagined as nor meaningfully engaged as important social actors. In the context of emergency, leaders have at times turned to children directly and in ways that find the state, at least, venturing beyond the social norms that govern childhood. Even very early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of illuminating instances of this emerged in countries of the Global North despite otherwise entrenched hegemonic norms of childhood.

A first notable case in point, following a media briefing on 13 March 2020, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark took questions about her government’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic from children via phones and tablets on the news service of DR Ultra, a Danish public television network for children aged 7–12 (Ultra Nyt, 2020). On 16 March, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg led a special news conference for her country’s children, 4 days after their schools were closed through her invocation of emergency powers to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus (Fouche, 2020). Two days later, on 18 March, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern also held a children’s news conference, accompanied by a noted microbiologist and a specialist in the communication of science for children (Roy, 2020). In a radio broadcast on 20 March, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland thanked her country’s children (CBC, 2020a) and, in his daily pandemic press briefing on 22 March, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged the impact of the crisis on young people, sharing that his own children were amusing themselves with increased screen time but missed seeing their friends, and he promised there would be more to come that would speak to Canadian children directly: ‘We’re going to have more to say to you soon’, he said, ‘so stay tuned. In the meantime, let’s make sure we all do our part. Let’s fight this together’ (Maclean’s, 2020).

Trudeau’s call to children to join with other Canadians and to do their part to fight the COVID-19 pandemic together is particularly noteworthy. While expressing empathy about their loss of access to schools and playgrounds, the cancellation of plans for spring break, and the understandable angst brought on by frightening circumstances and an uncertain future, the Canadian prime minister did not limit his words for the country’s children to things beyond their control. Instead, he explicitly positioned them as active and important participants in efforts to address the pandemic. ‘I know this is a big change’, he said, ‘but we have to do this not just for ourselves, but for our grandparents, our nurses, our doctors and everyone working at our hospitals. And you kids are helping a lot’ (Maclean’s, 2020). Even as misinformation, conspiracy theories, and outright denials of the pandemic’s very existence were spreading and gaining an alarming degree of traction globally (see, e.g. Baynes, 2020; Friedman, 2020; Noor, 2020; Sharma, 2020), Trudeau relied on children’s faith in the informed advice of physicians and scientists, whose expert knowledge he invoked in acknowledging children’s efforts at things like hand hygiene and physical distancing. His closing expression of gratitude for these contributions reflected this and more: ‘So a special thanks to all you kids. Thank you for helping your parents work from home. For sacrificing your usual day, for doing math class around the kitchen table, and for trusting in science’ (Maclean’s, 2020). Deputy Prime Minister Freeland’s own expression of thanks to Canadian children was offered in the same spirit.

The substance and tone of these early appeals to children as important social actors engaged in the performance of civic duty were neither inimitable nor fleeting. In the United States on 2 April, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo answered twenty questions selected from some 13,000 submitted by her state’s children (see Doiron, 2020). In a 45-minute televised address, she promised that the school year would not be lost and repeatedly called on her young audience to apply themselves in remote learning. While children may be accustomed to having teachers, parents, or other caregivers regularly pressing this expectation of them, it is fair to say that it would take on a qualitatively different tenor coming from their state’s governor. Notably, the first question selected for a response – that the questioning was a product of curation is significant from the standpoint of gleaning official interests and priorities conditioning the event – was from a kindergartener asking what kids could do to help out in the crisis. A later question inquired along similar lines and the answers given to others also picked up on this theme, giving the overall feel of not merely an information session but a rallying and an appeal to children to contribute. Among other things, Raimondo called on children to take personal responsibility for a variety of practices to help limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus, including hand hygiene, practicing physical distancing, and reporting instances of violation of public health orders. In answer to a question about the safety of healthcare workers, she urged children to be creative in thinking about how they might take more direct roles in the provision of desperately needed materiel. She also asked them to start journals to keep track of any personal contact they might have with others each day, thereby enlisting them in the collection of data that could be essential to effective epidemiological surveillance.

In a 5 April webcast hosted by 14-year-old Arjun Ram, a regular CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Kids News contributor, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau made good on his 22 March promise to those he had previously asked to ‘stay tuned’ and, together with Dr. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, answered questions selected from more than 4000 that were received from Canadian children in a span of just 24 hours following a call for submissions issued through the national public broadcaster (CBC, 2020b). The 10 questions chosen for responses came from children aged 5–12, with an average age of 8. In answer to one that asked about what could be done to help healthcare workers beyond just cheering them on, both Trudeau and Tam responded that children should practice physical distancing and careful hand hygiene. Tam answered a concern about what would happen in the case where a child’s parents might become seriously ill by asking children to initiate planning with their caregivers in advance. Coming in an address to the country’s children and not repeated more broadly in the prime minister’s regular daily televised press conference a few hours later (though he did reiterate thanks for all the efforts of children to help in the crisis), this very sensible advice would seem to presume the capacity of the young audience to assume the charge of taking on significant responsibility in ad hoc exigency planning – a precaution with potential implications for broader social stability and cohesion.

Later in the day on 5 April, Queen Elizabeth II addressed the Commonwealth of Nations in a pre-recorded message from Windsor Castle, the seriousness of the deepening COVID-19 crisis signaled in the fact this marked only her fourth such address in her 68-year reign. In the course of her brief remarks she took time to recall how in 1940, as children themselves, she and her sister had broadcast ‘to children who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety’, saying the circumstances of the COVID-19 crisis reminded her of that earlier experience. Summoning a clear link to the storied resilience of wartime Britain and to the contributions and sacrifices of the children of that era, the Queen made references to a proud past characterized by ‘attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humored resolve and of fellow-feeling’, and expressed the hope that ‘in the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge’. And, moving from her own childhood experience of helpful service in the face of emergency, she suggested the current generation would be remembered for the unity of its own collective response to crisis, adding that ‘its symbol will be the rainbows drawn by children’ (BBC, 2020). Going evening further, in his homily for Palm Sunday mass – held earlier the same day before a strikingly empty St. Peter’s Basilica, barred to the faithful by the pandemic – Pope Francis directed some singularly poignant words ‘especially to young people’, saying, ‘the real heroes who come to light in these days: they are not famous, rich and successful people; rather, they are those who are giving themselves in order to serve others. Feel called yourselves to put your lives on the line’ (Francis, 2020; emphasis in original). Like the remarks by Elizabeth II, the Pontiff’s words evoked tropes of duty, service, and even heroic self-sacrifice with clear and direct aspirational reference to children.

States of emergency

Key to understanding what is distinctive in these overtures is the state of emergency. Recent decades have seen important advances on children’s participation and, in light of this, moves to mobilize children in national pandemic mitigation efforts might not appear altogether remarkable. Increasingly, children’s advisory committees, councils, and parliaments have institutionalized new circuits for civic participation in a number of countries, including those whose leaders made a point of reaching out to children in the early days of the declared COVID-19 pandemic. To the extent that these produce meaningful possibilities for children to make a difference (Wall and Dar, 2011) in their societies, they may also move participation towards a fuller citizenship for children as children (Wall, 2017). These are important developments but the sorts of calls to mobilization we have witnessed under COVID-19 may be less connected to – and consequently less reflective of – such potential than they might at first appear to be. The context of this emergency is exceptional and, as such, occasions responses that are similarly exceptional. Times of acute crisis may accelerate change in norms and practices of governance in some instances but merely entail their suspension in others. The mobilization of women’s labour in the First World War, for example, spurred advances in women’s suffrage in a number of countries but failed to produce lasting changes in the relationship of waged labour practices to women’s economic disenfranchisement – suffragist movements were able to consolidate gains already made towards political participation on the strength of decades of incremental advances prior to the war but fuller participation in the economy proved transitory and conditioned on the state of emergency. Similarly, the question before us now is whether some national leaders’ appeals to children to join their countries’ responses to COVID-19 are moved by advances in children’s participation and evolving norms and practices of citizenship or are better understood as exception.

Certainly, there are significant indications of potentially transformative change in the governance of childhood that predate the present crisis. Usually associated most closely with Article 12 of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), children’s participation rights have achieved formal recognition from states in what has become the most widely ratified human rights covenant in the world. Implementation remains uneven, however, with better developed institutional arrangements in some localities and little to none in others. There is often wide variation even within single countries, reflecting the fact that much in the way of institutionalization is carried out by municipalities or at other subnational levels and often with scant indication of national priority. Moreover, participation itself runs a spectrum such that even seemingly robust institutional arrangements might sometimes be more pro forma than substantive in practice (see Golay and Malatesta, 2014). Generally, as in the framing of Article 12 itself, adults remain the gatekeepers of what is deemed appropriate to children’s participation (Arce, 2015) and the quality of that participation remains subject to adult assessment of competence (Horgan et al., 2017; Moran-Ellis and Sünker, 2013). Without discounting the advances of recent decades, then, there remains much in the way of indeterminancy and contingency to bedevil them.

Though some do markedly better than others, participation rights remain unevenly or poorly implemented and participation itself is at times nominal or tokenistic in all of the countries noted herein for their national leaders’ outreach to children in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Canada, Denmark and Norway all manifest significant shortcomings and inconsistencies despite decades of avowed commitment to children’s participation (see, e.g. Hancock, 2020; Hartoft, 2020; Nylund, 2020). For its part, New Zealand, which has made important strides in bringing children into policy processes (see Brown et al., 2020) still is not free of the fetters of limiting ideas about what constitute ‘children’s issues’ and, even where children’s direct interests are indisputably at stake, does not always have provisions for their participation (see, e.g. Taylor, 2017). In each of these cases, therefore, the call for children to participate in COVID-19 mitigation efforts is already a qualified exception to the extent that advances around children’s participation and citizenship remain works in progress. The significance of this comes more fully into relief when we consider that appeals for children to aid in pandemic mitigation have arisen not only where emergent norms and practices around their participation and citizenship rights are most developed but also where much less in the way of meaningful progress has been made.

Noteworthy too is that sovereign authority in all of these states has appealed to children directly in the context of national emergency. This is quite different from much of what has taken place around children’s participation in recent decades. State engagement through the UNCRC is in covenant with other states and thus conforms to established practices of sovereign power whilst much of the institutionalization and practice of children’s civic participation remains more local and subject to others of the qualifications briefly outlined above. As important as these advances have been, they have achieved less in terms of drawing states to engage children as important political subjects in and of the social worlds constituted by sovereign power. States of emergency, on the other hand, have had this effect in our present moment of crisis and in others that predate recent and ongoing advances on children’s participation. Though subnational authorities have also called on children under COVID-19, appeals issuing from sites of sovereign power directly are of a qualitatively different sort both for reason of their relative novelty and because they encode different kinds of limits on bona fide sociopolitical subjecthood, summoning it without apparent qualification but as an exigency of the emergency itself. As such, the present moment of crisis may have more in common with its historical antecedents than with the progressive hopes invested in new and emergent modalities in the governance of childhood.

A further caveat is that as the nature of emergencies is varied so too are their implications. The calls for children to contribute and the presumption both of their capacity and indispensability in doing so have historical and contemporary analogues in other periods of emergency, some transitory and others protracted. But not all are constitutive of the exception in the way that brings sovereign power to instantiate children as political subjects. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic spread swiftly around the globe, children in many places, particularly in the Global South, already figured vitally in individual, family, and community efforts to survive, mitigate, and remediate circumstances of crisis and emergency. From the spectacular (as child soldiers in zones of conflict, for instance) to the comparatively mundane (relied on for their essential contributions to the reproduction of domestic life, often in abject circumstances of extreme deprivation), children in many of the world’s less privileged environs assume roles that belie renderings of childhood as innocence and incapacity. This includes the performance of essential caregiving work in more localized circumstances of material scarcity, war, forced migration, and disease (Lund, 2007; Payne, 2012). For these children, the advent of a global COVID-19 pandemic manifested as a new dimension of extant complex emergencies – that is, situations in which social order and political infrastructure are already severely compromised by other exigent circumstances – in its mapping over and exacerbation of other intersecting crises. It arose not as a rupture in an otherwise more or less stable social world, but as a source of new demands made on children for whom emergency is quotidian and whose contributions to survival needs, already crucial and compulsory, are not mobilized in the same way.

In the Global North, where emergency is not the norm, many children also do the everyday work, necessitated by conditions of inequality, of abiding material hardship, contributing to domestic reproduction, and providing care. Here, as in many places of the Global South, the structurally embedded nature of the challenges faced allows them to recede into the quotidian such that the work performed by children is organic and not the upshot of any mobilization. The state, accordingly, betrays no notice of its reliance on this work. Similarly, though with a somewhat greater measure of organized direction, children of contemporary military families are routinely called to take on responsibilities and to comport themselves in ways necessary to facilitate the deployment of their soldier-parents to conflict zones (Beier, 2020). This, however, tends not to be visible as important work underwriting the military wherewithal of the state, narrated instead as individualized resilience (see Enloe, 2019). More directly, children have been mobilized to support implementation of urgent measures at intermittent times of acute crisis more apt to be experienced as shocks, such as in cases of natural disaster (Mort et al., 2018; Williams et al., 2017). These mobilizations, though not insignificant, remain particular and do not extend their remit to all children as an aggregate category of essential social actors.

On the level of whole societies, the First World War saw all manner of children’s participation and governments keen to marshal those contributions for the war effort. Beyond cases of young recruits lying about their age in order to join the fight directly, the larger story was one of children taking up supporting roles en mass as well as stepping into the waged and unwaged work vacated by men dispatched to the front. These efforts included fundraising for supplies and essential war materiel, participation in thrift campaigns designed to reduce homefront demands on production, and support of frontline morale by way of writing letters, knitting socks, and producing other small comforts for deployed soldiers (Fisher, 2011; Glassford, 2016; Graham, 2008; Mayall, 2018). In the United States, as food production came under strain following the country’s 1917 entry into the war, children were called on to accept responsibility for food conservation in the home and to contribute to supply via organized garden and animal husbandry clubs (Tunc, 2012). It was cast as a matter of patriotic duty for American children to join the United States School Garden Army, which organized child ‘garden soldiers’ into military-style companies under child ‘officers’, complete with rank insignia (Collins, 2011: 125). By 1918, children accounted for more than 10% of the workforce in France’s armaments industries alone (Marten, 2018: 90) while children of all warring countries, even those far from the fighting, were burdened with affective work associated with the war (see, e.g. Bennett, 2014; Graham, 2008). In an era marked too by a surge in revolutionary politics, children’s participation was also significant in moments of protest and resistance (Mayall, 2018), revealing the workings of more complex political subjecthoods than an emphasis on patriotic endeavours alone might suggest.

Some two decades later, as a new war consumed much of the world, state leaders once again turned to children for assistance. Even very young children of elementary school age were mobilized in campaigns for the collection of scrap metal and rubber necessary to the production of essential war materiel (Kirk, 1995). Canada’s Department of Munitions and Supply urged children to take on additional tasks at home and in the community to free up adult labour for service in munitions plants and the armed forces, explicitly pitching this as their helping to win the war (Beier, 2011). In the United States, the School Garden Army was revived as the School Garden Service (Collins, 2011: 129) and, as in other countries, children were encouraged to cultivate Victory Gardens on their own initiative. On the other side of the conflict, in 1942 alone millions of German girls and boys were mobilized for the harvest (Marten, 2018: 91). And while rallying of children in wartime might intuitively be associated with authoritarian regimes or those more proximate to the warzone, curricular and administrative changes in education made accommodations to and pressed for these mobilizations even in American schools far from the fighting (Field, 1994; Giordano, 2005). As in the aftermath of the First World War, the end of the conflict saw a return to erstwhile attitudes and practices regarding children’s participation (Mayall and Morrow, 2011: 247), though key aspects of many of these practices emerged again in East and West alike through the decades-long Cold War confrontation, with expressions in school curricula, leisure activities, framings of civic duty, and more, often bearing implicit or explicit appeals to patriotism and entreaties to children to do their part (Grieve, 2018).

Not to be overlooked, lessons learned from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, which claimed some 50 million lives worldwide (Johnson and Mueller, 2002), reverberated strongly in measures to address COVID-19. Then, as in 2020, populations were admonished to remain home so as to minimize transmission of the virus and, where this was implemented promptly and effectively, the human toll was less severe than where it was not (Bootsma and Ferguson, 2007). Punctuating the crisis of the First World War as it did with an even more dire emergency, this great global pandemic of the last century demonstrated so profoundly the necessity of whole-of-society efforts to mitigate viral spread that it came quickly to be cited as a rationale for drastic measures in response to COVID-19. With even more immediacy than the war, therefore, the 1918–1919 pandemic made demands on children as directly as on any other member of society and, especially for those in countries far from the fighting in Europe, brought its carnage more fully into their midst than the war ever had (Bennett, 2014). It led to children in U.S. schools from kindergarten onwards being instructed on safe coughing and sneezing, complete with military-styled ‘handkerchief drills’ (Tomes, 2010). Then as now, containment of the pandemic necessitated children’s participation as urgently as did the war – perhaps more so in light of the ever-present danger of viral spread.

In 2020, Victory Gardens re-entered the popular lexicon amidst the economic dislocations, intermittent shortages, and increased food insecurity triggered by mitigation responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (see, e.g. Goodwin, 2020; Marantos, 2020; Rao, 2020). This hearkening to the celebrated deeds of an earlier generation of young people bears a dimension of social discipline in setting up, as Elizabeth II did in her COVID-19 address, an example that it is strongly implied should be emulated – it is more than that, of course, but it is that also. Susan R. Fisher (2011: 33) notes that, during the First World War, Canadian children could be ‘called to task by the example of the soldiers’ as a way to underscore the importance of the contributions they were being asked to make. It is instructive, in this light, to consider how, speaking to the children of Canada under conditions of pandemic more than a century later, their prime minister explicitly cast their efforts and sacrifices as the fulfilment of an obligation to healthcare workers, at a moment in which the latter were widely cast in heroic terms for their courage – and, all too often, their personal sacrifice – in treating the sick.

There is much at work in Trudeau’s framing of obligation. It reflects respect for children as acting subjects as well as the state’s reliance on them as such. At the same time, exhorted by no less a figure of authority than the prime minister, it might also be read to bespeak a certain trepidation at the prospect of subjecthood not well enough regulated or insufficiently disposed to collective social aims. Participation may be called for, but when aligned with policy; dissent is decidedly unwelcome in a time of crisis (see Such et al., 2005). In this context, it is well to note that earlier emergencies have witnessed increased concern and, at times, outright moral panics over perceived juvenile delinquency (see, e.g. Myers and Poutanen, 2005) which, even in periods of relative stability, have led to calls for martial regulation of young people (Basham, 2011). Concessions on children’s subjecthood are not easily made by sovereign power and the stakes that occasion them are such that deviation from collective aims – real or perceived – is even less blithely accepted.

The exception (ap)proves the rule

War, as ultimate form of emergency, stands not only as an exemplar of emergency writ large but serves also as the font of metaphors for other crises. Mobilization and duty are central subtexts of the discourses and semiotics of war that carry over easily into the ways other urgent challenges are conceptualized and acted upon. Proving no exception to this, much in the way of official and popular discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic has affected a decidedly militarized disposition: efforts to overcome it are characterized as a ‘battle’ or ‘war’; the virus itself is frequently described as the ‘enemy’ while healthcare workers are said to be on the ‘front lines’ and calls are issued for them to be equipped with the ‘weapons’ needed to win the fight. These allusions reflect the broader sense of a war footing and the invocation of exceptional measures that include intrusions upon civil liberties. Geopolitical reverberations that include repatriation operations, the restriction or closing of borders, and xenophobic recriminations that conflate threat with national origin dovetail this in ways that reinforce the parochialism of emergency measures. At the same time, nationalist performatives – from spontaneous mass singings of national anthems to calls for the display of flags on private homes – aver a summons to duty constituted within the bounds demarcated by sovereign power. Together, these intersecting currents work to underwrite acceptance of a state of exception that entails suspension of a range of social norms and practices. Personal resilience in the face of profound disruption of accustomed lifeways – including but not limited to means of material reproduction – and collective action to prevail against the pathogen are transformed into civic duty. This is the broader context in which children’s subjecthoods are wrested from deferment to an imagined future and made present for present purposes under the emergency. The exigent framing of children as important political subjects is a key part of this state of exception wherein norms around the governance of childhood are among those suspended in order to facilitate a collective response to the crisis.

The governance of childhood is a key constituent of the governance of hegemonic sociopolitical order, from the local to the global. Much is invested in the child’s place in society as well as in the very idea of childhood itself as a technology for the limitation and control of abided subjecthood of those marked ‘childish’ (Basham, 2015), ‘child-like’, (Mills and LeFrançois, 2018) or ‘child’ (Beier, 2018). Typically, where the dominant modes of the governance of childhood are put under challenge is in circumstances where the broader hegemonic order is also under challenge (as, e.g. in the case of insurgent groups using child soldiers) or where that order fails to accommodate them (economies reliant upon child labour, for instance). Children the world over are daily engaged in crucial forms of work in contexts of emergency, including epidemics (Hunleth, 2020). The quotidian labour they routinely perform in local contexts of epidemic disease is essential to global public health (Hunleth, 2017), itself an essential constituent of well-functioning global governance. In states most privileged by the hegemonic global order, and which are therefore disposed to maintain and defend it, the governance of childhood as a key constituent of that order is typically only put under challenge when the state itself comes under some sort of significant threat, as in war or pandemic. The mobilization of children is thus an exigency of emergency and the consequent naming of exception that is the preserve of sovereign power. It is instructive, therefore, that the national leaders of the Global North who have made unusual efforts to reach out to children under the COVID-19 emergency have addressed themselves specifically to the children of their own countries.

Sovereign power in these exceptional circumstances recognizes and enlists children as meaningful and effectual political subjects, but does so in a manner that contains their subjecthood within the context of the emergency. It is precisely because it is allowed to emerge as exception that it does not constitute a challenge to hegemonic norms of the governance of childhood or to the broader hegemonic order of which those norms are part. The logic of the exception is that these norms are not repudiated but, rather, are merely suspended. With the passing of the emergency, so too pass the exceptional measures implemented to address it; they are interim, not transformative. The exception proves the rule – exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis, as the ancient legal precept has it – in the sense that the force of the rule is presumed in its suspension and the exception is, thus, its reaffirmation. And inasmuch as children are everywhere important and effectual subjects in and of their social worlds, the power to invoke or withhold recognition of that subjecthood confirms the other sense of rule: that of the sovereign authority that names the exception (Schmitt, 1985).

Conclusion

Childhood is, among other things, a technology of governance. Abided child subjecthood waxes and wanes across spatial and temporal registers in ways consonant with the demands of the prevailing social order. In the materially privileged Global North, the child of hegemonic imagining is typically more political resource than recognized social actor. Images of children are regularly summoned as emotional scenery (Brocklehurst, 2015: 32), useful in advancing political projects of the adult world (Lee-Koo, 2018: 51), but for sovereign authority to call on children themselves as needed contributors is rare. Together with the perhaps less remarkable gestures of some political leaders to reassure children about the future beyond COVID-19, tending to their sense of ontological security, the onset of the pandemic saw explicit moves towards enlisting children in the provision of materially present security. Normally framed as referent objects in security discourse, children in these moments were positioned as the acting subjects of the security of the political community that was centred as referent object: in the national and militarized discursive and semiotic framings of the emergency, the state. This flips the positioning of the state as acting subject of security and the essentialized child of hegemonic imagining as the referent object of the state’s security practices. Moreover, it holds children’s subjecthood visible – indeed, insists on its visibility – in ways from which sovereign power normally refrains.

While there might seem reason here to think this could signal a watershed moment for children’s civic participation, hegemonically imagined childhood endures concurrently with childhood under the exception. Adult-child relationships might appear in these exceptional moments to play out in different ways, but it is not clear that the terms of these relationships necessarily change appreciably. Elsewhere, children remain beholden to the usual circulations of social power as well as to the norms governing child and adult worlds. Their relationships vis-à-vis parents, teachers, and others are not affected in the same way – it is the relationship to sovereign power that we see undergo a momentary change distinct from longer-run and uneven trends towards increased civic participation. What is at work here is not a state of exception in the fullest Schmittian sense inasmuch as no laws or formal relationships are set in abeyance. Rather, it is an analogous form as the state suspends norms under emergency that nevertheless endure in the private sphere as well as in other public realms such as education. It is a suspension of norms in the governance of childhood that, in the instant of sovereign power’s naming of the exception, reconfirms those norms as well. Looking to historical antecedents, wherein erstwhile norms in the governance of childhood were restored with the passing of emergency, similarly offers little encouragement for hopes of something more transformative. Earlier mobilizations premised on children’s bona fide subjecthood thus held normative childhood in simultaneity with the non-normative childhood called into being through the exception, the former very much intact and the latter coterminous with the emergency. The childhoods of COVID-19, hegemonic and exceptional, are likewise simultaneous and both very much subject to and reaffirmative of sovereign power. The novel political moments of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, may thus turn out to be less so than they might at first appear.