The COVID-19 pandemic triggered waves of public health measures — lockdowns, school closures, cancellations of social activities — with profound impacts on young Australians’ health and well-being. Young people in Australia have experienced increased isolation and anxiety, especially those already marginalised or living with disadvantage.
Together with my colleagues, Peter Kelly, James Goring, and Meave Noonan, we just published an article that builds on the work where we engaged nearly 100 young people in in video-based interviews in two separate projects that have been concerned with asking young people about their lives in the present (that was 2020–2023) and the challenges and opportunities that they imagined in their futures—personally and more widely concerning the crises of the pandemic, the climate and global capitalism.
The stories of participants like Daisy and Elijah illuminate complex entanglements between well-being, education, employment, and connections with place and community. In this context, we tell a version of Daisy and Elijah’s stories and introduce and then extend on the idea of socio-ecological understandings of young people’s health and well-being, to argue that while these models offer productive possibilities, they fail to critically account for the crises of capitalism and the climate that the pandemic is a consequence of.
Drawing from theorists like Haraway and Lupton, the stories of Daisy and Elijah urge us to reconsider well-being as entangled with multispecies relationships and the places young people inhabit, challenging traditional human-centred perspectives. Embracing these challenges calls for continued experimentation in how we tell (geo)stories of young people like Daisy and Elijah—stories that capture the possibilities and hopes for living well in the context of the Anthropocene.
The article is available for free download from this link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/11033088251320762