Counternarratives of COVID-19: Reflections on gender justice in representation, collaboration, and contestation

• In Event: Counternarratives, Decolonising Methodologies, and Gender Justice in Research

Proposal

Throughout COVID-19, news agencies, celebrities, and international organizations have raised alarm about the pandemic’s threat to girls’ education in the Global South (e.g., Lawford 2020). With schools closed, influential global actors worried the pandemic would ‘reverse gains’ for girls (Save the Children, 2020) and imperil decades of progress toward gender equitable education (UNESCO, 2020). In Malawi, UNICEF (2021) decried that 13,000 girls had ‘fallen pregnant’ during school closures in a blog that featured one mother who returned to school, ‘shak[ing] off COVID-19 regret’. These stories echoed timeworn concerns about the risks that sexuality, and pregnancy, pose to schooling, particularly among girls in Africa.

As news and development agencies coalesced around a narrative of sexualized girls in crisis, our transnational research team became interested in counternarratives to complicate the relationships among COVID-19, girls’ education, and gendered risk. Our team’s collective, yet distinct, experiences living, working, and researching in Malawi—where this study took place—underscored our suspicion that these discourses profoundly mischaracterized girls, their struggles, and their calibrated protestations. Dominant discourses of girls in crisis reinforced hegemonic, Euro-centric and monolithic constructions of Malawian gender realities (Chilisa and Ntseane 2010). In a research project spanning 2020-2023, we sought collaborative methodologies that moved beyond voice-giving exercises (Khoja-Moolji 2020) to allow for more gender-just processes that, in turn, ‘illustrate alternative and decolonial knowledge about Malawian gender reality with a specific focus on participants’ expressions of agency’ (Kamlongera and Kamlongera Katenga-Kaunda 2022:1; see also Chikondenji 2023). Yet the process of collaborating on this research raised questions for our team about the limitations and possibilities of girl-focused research.

This presentation documents our methodological approaches as well as the opportunities, challenges, and conundra that emerged as we considered Malawian girls’ daily lives during the pandemic. Understanding girls as knowledge producers and change agents (Oakley, 1994), we chose methods that we hoped would make space for girls to express everyday joys and struggles (Moletsane, Mitchell, Smith, & Chisholm, 2008). Specifically, we (2 North American researchers, 1 Malawian researcher, and a Malawian Advisory Board) designed a longitudinal cohort study that relied upon participatory journaling and interviewing with Malawian research team members. We invited 24 girls in both upper primary and secondary school to participate. To include girls who had a range of schooling experiences, our sample included a mix of ‘high performing,’ ‘low performing,’ and out-of-school girls from urban, peri-urban and rural schools in and around Zomba, Malawi. We then used journal entries to develop new interview topics (Breheny, Horrell & Stephens, 2020; Watkins and Swidler 2009).

This cohort study with Malawian girls was one component of a multi-level comparative case study that, more broadly: 1) examined discursive constructions of gendered risk and COVID-19 in media and development industry sources; 2) considered whether and how frameworks of gendered risk informed material interventions into girls’ schooling; and 3) explored girls’ lived experiences navigating schooling during a pandemic in Southern Malawi. Our multi-level approach required examination across narratives and pushed us to ‘look inside language as well as outside it’ (Chadwick, 2017, p. 11). We were interested, therefore, as much in youth experiences as how different representations emerge and are circulated, and the social and material consequences of these representations.

The broader study has resulted in several interrelated findings. First, we have documented how global discourses of gendered risk emphasize sexualized problems and reproduce racialized differences (Silver & Morley, 2023). At the same time, the intersection of COVID-19 and the 2020 aid funding cuts have shaped both gender-focused programs and the relational infrastructure of the aid industry (Morley & Silver, under review). Our research with Malawian girls, however, has revealed that the primary animating concerns from 2020-2023 had less to do with COVID-19 as an isolated emergency, with sex, or with pregnancy, than with pre-existing challenges related to educational quality, school resourcing, and maintaining health in poverty. Southern Malawian girls told a counternarrative about gendered risk that is deeply contextual, and that situates the coronavirus as one, among many, pressures to youth wellbeing. Intersectionality helps us braid our findings together and relate them to systemic injustices. As a framework, intersectionality ‘highlight[s] how broader processes (e.g., patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and heterosexism) intersect to engender forms of advantage and inequality’ (Sangaramoorthy & Benton 2022, p. 3).

In their journals, girls documented things bringing them joy and things that were causing them stress. They wrote about joy from doing well on tests, receiving gifts, or visits from friends. Stress emerged around teasing in school and difficulties paying school fees. Those who were mothers worried about caring for their babies and told stories of interactions which added to or alleviated these concerns.

These stories offer countertellings of the pandemic’s influence on young people. They also raise new concerns for our team. With a focus power and the (im)possibilities of shifting the politics of knowledge production (protest), this presentation will consider the following questions:

1) (How) is it possible to build a meaningfully collaborative transnational research team when institutional affiliations and grant-seeking possibilities mean that funding flows are unidirectional? We build here on a robust literature that demonstrates how North/South research partnerships can reflect and exacerbate geopolitical inequities (e.g., Dlamini et al, 2012; Landau, 2012; Essam El Refaei, 2020).

2) How do our distinct positionalities shape how we engage with this work? For instance, Makhuva’s engagement was informed by personal experience re-entering school as a teen mother, and by a deep desire to ensure the girls voice out their struggles around schooling as well as their difficulties in family relationships.

3) How can we recognize the complex, evolving motivations that underscore participation in a research project, along with the profound material inequalities between researchers and participants? What does this mean for ‘consent’ and for ‘incentives’ in research?

4) What does it mean to carry out a ‘girl-focused’ study in a context where communal decision-making and support are fundamental? How do IRB notions of risk, consent, and incentives relate to these community-based models?

5) (How) can any effort to represent another, through a research study, be gender just?

Authors

• Alyssa L Morley, Michigan State University

• Stella B. Makhuva

• Rachel Silver, Faculty of Education, York University