Abstract
This article engages with issues arising from a 2021–2022 project consulting with Pakistani heritage-identifying adults in an economically deprived British town, Rochdale, to document and communicate their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. While our original research brief reflected local and national government concerns around the “child mental health crisis,” matters affecting educational practices and other support provisions for children emerged that were neither specifically educational nor child-focused. Our participant accounts foregrounded experiences of transgenerational, historical, racialised, and intersectional gendered oppression (re)kindled by the government responses to the pandemic. We mobilise two research analytic to interpret consultation extracts, “child as method” and “border as method.” We caution that a child-focused approach works to abstract and depoliticise wider historical and socioeconomic inequalities alongside racism and transgenerational injustice whilst psychologising issues of “mental health.” Then, we question both what is topicalised and excluded by “child mental health,” without minimising wider traumatogenic contexts of distress affecting both children and adults arising from racialised, transgenerational, gendered oppression. Engaging Fanon's psycho-political understandings with feminist analyses, we conclude by arguing how claims to, and for, “childhood” support provision and “mental health” sit within wider axes of oppressive power relations.
Keywords
The Pakistani Communities Call to Action (PaCCT) project (Choudry et al., 2021b) was a small impact-oriented study conducted during and as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sophina Choudry consulted with and interviewed local Pakistani community members in Rochdale and, together with colleagues and participants, created the “calls to action” (hence the project title) that strategised participants’ voices and needs during the lockdown. The focus on Pakistani (self)-identified people was a response to prevailing negative press coverage of this community, alongside the disproportionate impacts they experienced from the pandemic. These “calls” spanned educational, medical, and environmental concerns and were conveyed to policymakers and influencers (i.e., local and national government and media) (Choudry et al., 2021a). To clarify these initial foci, in the context of the pandemic, the attention to health concerns was particularly shaped by well-known and widespread problems in accessing services during this period, while the education focus in part arose from our institutional location (in a university Institute of Education) during a period when educational provision was forced to meet the challenges of school closures in the face of lockdown. The environmental interest reflected our ecosocial convictions that climate-related issues (including air quality, flooding, drought, rubbish disposal, etc.) impact communities and their lack of well-being in major and typically unacknowledged ways, particularly for poorer communities. At the same time, the address to the media was prompted by the general overlooking of representation of (especially working-class and minoritised) community concerns, alongside significant dis- and mis-information specifically about these communities that—as we discuss further—became particularly evident during the lockdown.
Reconceptualising the Problem: Whose “Crisis”?
In this paper, we mobilise a Fanonian analysis (Fanon, 2001, 2008) to situate how issues of health and pandemic are inevitably intertwined and cannot be addressed without psycho-political and psycho-affective analysis of race and racism. Inspired by Fanon's pedagogy of failure (Burman, 2019; Gordon, 2015), which rejects the idea of mastery and dominant narratives (in this case, about health and progress), we refuse from the outset the notion of a “mental health crisis.” Instead, we approach this as a trope such that the “mental health crisis” obscures the intersections and intimate connections between race, racism, and oppression amid and beyond the pandemic. Building on and moving beyond previous discussions of the pandemic (Dege & Strasser, 2021), we also suggest that enclosing issues of oppression, race, and racism within the discourse of “mental health crisis” and the pandemic psychologises (De Vos, 2012) oppression and racism and thus obscures their systemic roots. In the same vein, we address how children and, therefore, the “child mental health crisis” function potently even when the subjects of this (i.e., embodied children) are absent.
To undertake this work, we mobilise two research analytic frameworks: child as method (Burman 2019, 2024) and border as method (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). These frameworks provide a deeper, anticolonial Fanonian analysis of our community interview-based consultations with members of the Pakistani communities in Rochdale during the lockdown in England. They illustrate how a child focus and “mental health crisis” discourse both function as tropes that abstract and depoliticise wider historical and socioeconomic inequalities while psychologising issues of “mental health.” When children and childhood appear in participant narratives through intergenerational stories of racism and oppression, such stories often seem to be ignored or deemed “not relevant” in discussions surrounding both children and adults regarding health and COVID-19. Therefore, we approach the trope of “child mental health” with suspicion, helping whitewash state bodies with claims of care and innocence , both of which were critiqued by the material generated from our participants.
We propose that child as method and border as method provide fruitful conceptualisations for understanding how individual lived experience interconnects with wider dynamics of oppression. We approach individual lived experiences intersectionally (Cho et al., 2013; Collins & Bilge, 2016) to signpost how class, gender, race, and generation, as axes of power, as well as marginalisation, privilege, and oppression work both structurally and psycho-affectively. Intersectionality addresses how multiple forms of inequality compound or otherwise moderate experiences of power and oppression, and create conditions that are not recognised (or, alternatively, are psychologised) within discourses of mental health or “child mental health crisis” amid the pandemic. This does not mean that psychology and mental health can tackle issues of race and racism. On the contrary, it reveals how mental health discourse, even when it acknowledges experiences of power and oppression, risks reducing these to psychological issues, deflecting responsibility.
Drawing upon this exploratory study with members of the Pakistani communities in Rochdale, this article therefore engages with the concerns of this Special Issue in three ways. First, we highlight the slipperiness of the subject(s) of “child mental health,” since what was originally formulated as a child-focused project (around how well the educational and other support needs of children were being met in the context of the lockdown) instead, in our consultations, elicited quite different material. We encountered stories of long-standing racialised and gendered experiences of oppression that key features of the current political and social context, notably the failures and lack of responsiveness of current support services, were exacerbating.
Second, from this, we offer some critical reflections on how the framework (or discourse) of “child mental health”—albeit naming a core area of policy concern—obscures other political and analytical perspectives. This includes intergenerational relations and associated affective dynamics as indicators of the exclusion and disaffection of racialised, minoritised communities.
Third, we demonstrate how two analytic frameworks—child as method (Burman, 2019, 2023a, 2023b, 2024) and border as method (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013)—can help engage and inform analyses that transcend the project's original aims for a call to action. As such, we acknowledge the limits of the study (as circumscribed also by its funding 1 and as informed by prevailing discourses of “impact”), albeit the analytical–reflexive work this project provoked for us has inspired and informed further work.
The next section introduces our conceptual framework before we move to situate the cultural, historical, and social context of the study and the analysis of our material.
Conceptual Frameworks: Fanon, Child as Method, Border as Method
We draw on Frantz Fanon's writings as a key resource supporting our critical approach to the “child mental health crisis” as well as informing our two main analytical frameworks: child as method and border as method. Fanon's work is increasingly recognised as central to analyses foregrounding the embodied, phenomenological experience of, especially racialised, oppression (Fanon, 2008), as well as modelling both the limits and possibilities of therapeutic interventions in contexts of colonialisation (Fanon, 2001). As is well known, Fanon resigned in 1956 from his post as medical director of the main psychiatric hospital in Algeria to join the liberation struggle. However, he maintained a clinical practice and continued innovating around deinstitutionalising mental health provision in exile in Tunis (Fanon, 2018a, 2018b). While Fanon did not specifically write about children's mental health, it is noteworthy that many of the cases he discusses in Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 2001) concern children and young people, whether as witnesses to or as perpetrators of violence. Furthermore, as Burman (2019) discusses, the figure of “child” functions powerfully within the only “complete” case history Fanon offers by virtue of the meanings set in play for the adult patient.
Inspired by Fanon, “child as method” and “border as method” are related but distinct frameworks supporting our analysis. Child as method is a feminist, decolonial approach informed by intersectional perspectives that reads the race, gender, class, and generational geopolitical orders set in play by discourses of child/children/childhood as informing both psychic and political economies (see Burman, 2023b). As an intervention in and between psychology, childhood, education, psychosocial, and feminist studies, it works bidirectionally: firstly, to demonstrate how and with what effects (and affects) wider geopolitical issues are reflected and enacted within studies topicalising childhood; and, secondly and correspondingly, to illustrate how and with what effects (and affects) the recourse to and mobilisation of child and childhood contributes to, supports, or resists those geopolitical concerns (Burman, 2023a, 2023b, 2024; Cassal, 2024; Christinaki, 2025). Of particular relevance to this article is the attention to intergenerational dynamics since our participants, as parents of school-aged children, spoke not only about their children but also about resonances with their own childhoods. Intersections between gender, generation, and affectively charged community identifications have been noted as particularly (re)activated and intensified by the pandemic (Mitchell & Smith, 2023; Rana et al., 2021). Our mobilisation of child as method here indicates how the discourse on “child mental health” fails to acknowledge broader and intergenerational experiences of racism obscured by prevailing discourses on childhood. Moreover, we suggest how the trope of “child mental health” furthers exclusionary approaches to, and interventions around, children and mental health, thereby reproducing the stigmatisation and marginalisation of racialised people via a psychologisation of racism, thus maintaining the whiteness and innocence of childhood-related and other support services (see also Rollo 2018).
Further, child as method's conceptual–political inspirations from cultural studies (notably, Asia as method; Chen, 2010) and migration studies (border as method; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013) foreground decolonial commitments and engagement with questions of racialisation (see Bernstein, 2004; Rollo, 2018; Stoler, 2010). We therefore mobilise child as method here as a lens to interrogate the displacements enacted by the trope of “child mental health,” which is already attracting some critical attention (Davies, 2024; Haidt, 2024). Also, and in line with previous works (Cassal et al., 2024; Christinaki, 2025; Herbert, 2023), this paper engages with and contributes to questions of racialisation and child as method. We develop these insights further via border as method, to highlight how this deployment engages and intersects with bordering practices of racialisation, marking exclusion and inclusion. The status of “method” in both frameworks is as analytic frame prompting the focus of research questions and driving the analysis, rather than specifying technique or, indeed, disciplinary affiliations. In fact, like intersectionality, these approaches work to frame particular, politicised inquiry and so are best explained through practical examples.
In that sense, when our material failed to align with the views held by local providers and institutions, it was fruitful in suggesting to us that we had accessed nonnormative and somewhat unwelcome perspectives that posed significant challenges to those providers. Such “failures” are productive prompts or provocations for reconsideration of dominant assumptions, as Fanon suggested. As Burman (2024, p. 1186) argues, the “pedagogical politics of failure comes into play as a critique of colonial mastery also anticipating current discussions of epistemic humility and partiality.” Indeed, this small-scale exploratory study aimed to target as participants people in minoritised or marginalised positions most likely to be underserved in the current context (Crossley & Baybutt, 2024; Patel et al., 2020). Hence, following the research analytic of child as method and border as method, instead of dismissing these, perhaps “outlying,” accounts, we took them as vital (re)sources to be recognised, taken seriously, and worked with. This also invites critical reflection on what that focus on “child mental health” achieves, or rather, what it succeeds in overlooking or leaving unaddressed (see Giacaman, 2018). Our research analytic therefore signposts how the trope of “child mental health crisis” forecloses and psychologises accounts of oppression in marginalised communities as it resists acknowledging the harm generated by institutional and state racism, exclusion, and oppression. It should be noted that we include educational engagement under the rubric of “child mental health” since this was a major topic of concern at the time, given the context of lockdown and compulsory homeschooling (albeit to some extent supported with online provision by schools). As indicated above, this was our original focus and we did report on this (Choudry et al., 2021b), but our focus here is on how the material generated illuminated additional issues.
Beyond “Crisis” and “Mental Health”
Our central argument is that the current national and international policy focus on the “crisis” of “child mental health” (see e.g., Benton et al., 2021), especially during and after the pandemic (although it was emerging before), works to distract or divert attention from other concerns, exclusions, and marginalisations, including racialised and gendered oppression. As highlighted by child as method, this is fuelled by the personification of interiority long associated with the figure of the child in Western culture under modernity (see also Steedman, 1995). This focus on the individual, vulnerable child psychologises issues of mental health, depoliticising wider historical, social, and economic inequalities, and then placing responsibility for these on family and community, especially women. This is not, of course, an original argument since many feminists have pointed out, for example concerning the rise of the policy focus on “adverse child experiences,” how this effectively strips away political contexts for and current conditions of inequality to instead pathologise and responsibilise parents (Edwards et al., 2019; Kiely & Swirak, 2022; Macvarish & Lee, 2019). Nor does acknowledging this point at all diminish the problem—undoubtedly exacerbated in manifold ways (ranging from the pressure on service provision to isolation and de-socialisation)—of children's mental health during and since the pandemic (Felfe et al., 2023).
A recent Children's Society report (2024), which combines national and international data on children's self-reported well-being, highlights how U.K. children and young people fare less well relative to other countries, citing food insecurity and environmental deprivations, including poverty, yet says less about questions of racism. Hence, our research analytic and discussion here adds to and complexifies existing analyses by highlighting the role of affect and historical transgenerational trauma as mediating relations between (in this case, minoritised) community members, including children, and the services and modes of political representation to which they are entitled. Ayodeji et al. (2021; see also Devakumar et al., 2025) clarify how systematic and structural racism has adverse effects on people's physical and psychic health, which were exacerbated during COVID-19, yet not acknowledged in mental health discussions as effects of racism. On that note, Kollins (2021) claims child mental health practices and policies are structurally racist in ignoring questions of racism and thus introducing barriers to advancing knowledge and improving mental health for children of all racialised and ethnic backgrounds. In the context of the systematic and structural nature of racism within the UK, Simela et al. (2024) have pointed out its intergenerational consequences. Specifically, they have shown how parents’ exposure to racism (an element that we will unpack further below) has a direct impact on their offspring's mental health and well-being. Even more, Ghezae et al. (2022) discuss how racism affects the mental health and well-being of children and young people in the UK, elaborating on how this impact, rather than being psychologised and pathologised, should be seen as an adverse effect that spans Black and Asian heritage children’s and young people's lives. They know they need to work harder than their White counterparts, appear more palatable to protect themselves, and enter into career decision-making alreadyanticipating how they will be treated. Following Fanon's (2001, 2008) analysis, the argument is not to psychologise racism and so reduce it to a matter of “mental health,” but rather to expose its colonial, imperial, capitalist, and structural foundations where relief can only emerge through the pursuit of social justice.
Neoliberal psychological discourses (but see e.g., Burman, 2012), rooted in racial capital, mark some bodies and communities as deserving of support, and others as disposable (Bhattacharyya, 2018, 2023). Such analyses invite examination across the physical and the political, the ecosocial and psycho-affective, to attend to geopolitical contexts and challenges, especially in relation to forms of racism (see also Bhattacharyya, 2015; Malm & The Zetkin Collective, 2021). The participants with whom we consulted reported feeling these demarcations acutely, which was not surprising given how the pandemic intensified and exacerbated all social, health, and mental health inequalities (Hu, 2020). Nevertheless, as our analysis will show, none of them claimed that “mental health” interventions would resolve the issues discussed around racism.
We see the issues posed by the tensions between “official” accounts of support needs and service provision and the versions we documented as posing in miniature key questions around sociopolitical engagement, including how these mediate (and often exacerbate) experiences of exclusion. Beyond this, our analytic focus here is to explore further the racialised and gendered politics of community inclusion and exclusion enacted by the focus on “child mental health.”
Situating the Study
In this and the next section, we clarify some methodological aspects of our material framing how our study expands issues of “child mental health crisis” to broader transgenerational, historical, racialised, and intersectional gendered forms of oppression.
Firstly, in terms of locality, Rochdale is a postindustrial, largely (but not entirely) economically deprived town of around 220,000 people (as noted in the 2021 census) within the ambit of Greater Manchester, UK, in what was once a thriving textile manufacturing area. 2 The 2021 census notes Rochdale as among the top 40% most densely populated local authorities, with a rising population. In terms of economic indicators, the 2021 census also records Rochdale as having an increasing number of lone parents, and, like many areas of the UK, a significant decrease in social housing provision. While unemployment was recorded as less than 4%, national patterns of underemployment, as also mediated by caring commitments, were reflected in this context.
This is also intersectionally related to gender and social class positioning (Cam, 2014; Warren, 2015), while both overemployment and underemployment give rise to increases in mental health difficulties (Bell & Blanchflower, 2019). In terms of composition, the population was recorded in 2021 as over three quarters British-born, with Pakistan noted as the second largest country of origin (at just over 5%). In terms of identity, 18.5% of Rochdale residents identified their ethnic group within the Asian, Asian British, or Asian Welsh category (Office for National Statistics, 2023), and a similar percentage described themselves as Muslim.
It is also worth noting that Rochdale has featured many times in national news, both during the project and more recently in national and international news in 2024. For instance, widely reported protests emerged from Rochdale's Pakistani communities (that spread nationally) when a Pakistani Muslim family, who reside in this locality, was subjected to excessive use of police force during an incident that took place at Manchester Airport. Also in 2024, the far-right parties in England collectively mobilised through race riots and hate marches after three girls were murdered and 10 children were seriously injured on July 29 in the nearby town of Southport. Even though it emerged that the perpetrator of the crime was neither Muslim nor an immigrant, Muslim communities, including in Rochdale, were blamed. Hence, the historical, cultural, and political contexts of this locality, as of any area, have to be taken into account whilst investigating lived experiences of marginalisation and oppression. However, we should also acknowledge how communities resist despite such oppression. It is indicative that people in Rochdale and Greater Manchester (including us) have continued to mobilise for freeing Palestine and against the genocide, military occupation, settler colonial rule, and apartheid inflicted by the Zionist Israeli state in the stolen Palestinian land.
Situating Participants and Researchers
The PACCT project explicitly engaged and addressed participants that were Rochdale residents and identified as Pakistani (or of Pakistani heritage). Beyond this, they were diverse in terms of gender and class as well as regarding religious, regional, and cultural identifications (and religiosity), which is why we prefer to talk of “communities” in the plural. However, in the context of escalating racialisation and Islamophobia in the UK (as globally), the connection between “Pakistani” and “Muslim” is socially and institutionally determined, and this was felt especially acutely during the pandemic when (as we discuss further below) the national government instituted local as well as nationwide lockdowns that were experienced as portraying specific communities as untrustworthy or as hotbeds of contagion. This was even though, as is well documented, the “excess deaths” of Black and minoritised people in the UK arose from their disproportionate representation in health and emergency services, insecure or undocumented employment, and less access to healthcare (Gogoi et al., 2024; Oskrochi et al., 2023). This was exemplified by test sites monitoring infection being located within Deeplish, a high-density Muslim residential area within Rochdale, which was experienced as working to inflate racialised differences in the documentation of infection rates. Further, the declaration of a national lockdown on the eve of Eid was perceived as a particular insult, given that pubs and restaurants had been reopened. Due to these manifestations of racially differentiated responses, historical forms of oppression and lived experiences of racism came to the fore during the consultations.
We highlight as also noted with funding that this project took the form of what we called interview-based consultations rather than research interviews, to foreground rather than analyse or interpret the perspectives of our participants, to whom we refer in this paper using pseudonyms. Moreover, this project's local and situated character was deliberate since the lead researcher, Sophina Choudry, lived in close vicinity at the time of the research, and wanted to elaborate ways of documenting and mobilising around concerns she was encountering in daily life. She designed the project with colleagues (Erica Burman and Julian Williams), secured its funding, and carried it out, while supported by Sidra Iftikhar and Ishba Rehman (see Choudry et al., 2021b). This article extends reflexive discussions undertaken by the whole project team and also elaborates on classed, racialised, and gendered researcher positionings discussed in Choudry et al. (Choudry, Burman, & Williams, 2024; Choudry, Christinaki, Williams, & Burman, 2024a, 2024b).
The lead researcher collaborated with 17 community members and conducted online interview-based consultations to produce (with the research team) the call-to-action document. Participants were identified and recruited through local community and/or charity groups and businesses, and then invited for an online interview. Although there was an interview schedule, the discussion was open and was sometimes conversational rather than a formal interview. This is why we refer to them as “interview-based consultations.” Many of these consultations were conducted in Urdu or Punjabi. They were transcribed verbatim by Sophina Choudry and another multilingual Pakistani heritage research assistant, Sidra Iftikhar, and then translated to English and checked with native language speakers. Where needed, these interview-based consultations were followed up to clarify or get feedback on the ongoing development of the “call-to-action document,” which was then discussed with participants in workshops. The project was reviewed and granted ethical approval by The University of Manchester Full Research Ethics Committee (2020-10163-16202).
The PACCT project generated provocative material, and the choice of extracts discussed below was motivated by two considerations: first, the research team's sense of the incongruity or dissonance with official (policy and media) narratives of the pandemic; and second, our surprise at the particular associations made, which seemed noteworthy since they transcended prevailing pandemic narratives. Most of all, we were struck by the passion, emotions, and, at times, pain in the voices driving and articulating some of the accounts. This is a feature that is typically overlooked in wider political discourse.
It should also be acknowledged that the PACCT project only consulted adults, albeit adults who were parents, carers, or grandparents of school-aged children under 18 years of age. This could account for the shift in emerging material from child-related and education concerns to adult community and wider social issues. Children's perspectives on their mental health and its intersection with prevailing sociopolitical and relational contexts is vital and of major significance to questions of provision and evaluation of support systems (e.g., Harris & Davidge, 2019). At the same time, however, given the ways dominant discourses on childhood typically abstract children from relational, family, community, and political contexts, and how children are instrumentalised within national and international policies (for economic development, as future human capital, etc.; e.g., Baird, 2008; Burman, 2020; Roberts-Holmes & Moss, 2021), we contend that it is important to remain vigilant about what the focus on children and childhood does in terms of its inclusions (or topicalisations) and exclusions.
Moreover, as researchers based in an elite higher education institution, we were acutely aware of the ways our efforts to document and transmit a “call to action” could recapitulate prevailing racialised power dynamics of expertise, especially as the two most senior research team members are White (despite one also being from a minoritised background). Indeed, Sophina Choudry was quizzed by participants about the racialised backgrounds of the rest of the team (see Choudry, Christinaki, Williams, & Burman, 2024a). Our account below, while selective, is informed by ethical–political commitments, expressed by Tuck (2009), to speaking with and not for marginalised communities, and to countering deficit and pathologised representations. On this last point, we should also note that even though Rochdale is an economically deprived region and this was reflected in the socioeconomic status of some of the participants, others who were keen to take part were far from being impoverished. Yet, as will be seen below, class positioning did not mitigate and, arguably, might even have intensified experiences of racism.
Having outlined our analytical frameworks and the context for the material we will discuss, we now move to provide an analysis that considers how this transcends the “child mental health crisis.”
Beyond “Mental Health,” COVID-19, and Discourses of Crisis: An Antiracist Analysis
In this section, we will discuss four examples from the project material, using child as method and border as method to highlight occlusions in the dominant discourse of the “child mental health crisis” amid the pandemic.
From Health to Schools: Racist Underpinnings
The “child mental health crisis” discourse during and after the pandemic is ubiquitous. Media reports claim that escalating numbers of children are presenting with mental health difficulties. For example, a recent article in The Guardian (see Gregory, 2024) argued that the number of children and young people referred to the National Health Service (NHS) for mental health support had doubled since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Without underestimating the impact of the pandemic, child as method helps interrogate both “childhood” and “mental health” as social conditions or categories by which to evaluate the different narratives about and for the child.
In relation to our project, this meant that despite having a focus on “schooling” and educational needs, we also attended to the broader issues emerging around and for the community. According to one participant, Luqman, a cis male middle-class parent and grandparent who had lived all his life in Rochdale, COVID-19 brought to the forefront how in a town where most people identify as “Asian,” this positioning is not reflected in the educational staff composition at schools. In his words: Yes, you have Asians there, but they will be teaching assistants, cleaners, and will be on benefit jobs. And yes, there are 99.95% Pakistani Muslims, and the staff is predominantly English. Don’t blame the community if you are putting White middle-class English in the demonstration and control of it … They rarely give the deputy headship to the Asians. Some more than 90% of the children are Pakistani. I remember one of the people came to me and said, “oh, your son goes to that Paki school.” I said “yes, yes, he goes to Paki school.” He turned back to me and said, “I am sorry.” I said, “it's okay.” I know some people may not be racist, but they have prejudices for the brown and Black.
Moving to our second analytical frame, border as method, this traces how those excluded by racialised and national borders nevertheless become a productive site of labour for capital precisely because of their exclusion. In the extract above, Luqman's comments could be read as highlighting how “racial capitalism,” in Bhattacharyya's (2018) words, reproduces class and racialised positions for and through childhood and education. “Asians” working in low-paid jobs while education and teaching are carried out and represented by middle-class English is a core indication of racial capital, grounded in the extraction of social and economic value. Of course, this observation is not new, as it is well established in decolonial and postcolonial literature (Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Zembylas, 2014). It is, however, interesting how the “child mental health crisis,” as a research paradigm on mental health and educational needs amid the pandemic, works not only to overlook but also to intensify and shape further structural, and not only educational, injustices. Moreover, it invites attention to how “race” and racism intersect with class positions in mental health and educational research, as also embedded in the structural dynamics of society. Even more, Luqman continued by discussing how structural injustices and racism became sharper for racialised communities living in impoverished areas during the pandemic: “But now when Brexit has happened, and the racists are in charge of the country, [this] did give them the confidence to say that [to] your face now.”
Hence, this view from a minoritised, marginal context such as Rochdale suggests that, while media reports (see Ackerley, 2024; Gregory, 2024) have become attentive to COVID-19's impact on children's mental health, and the British Educational Research Association (BERA) created a Guide to Mental Health and Well-Being in Schools (see Jayman et al., 2024), it seems that not all children and not all children's mental health and well-being are equally valued. Following child as method, the question of which children these media reports and guides focus on can be interrogated, and how structural racism and class positioning can become separated from considerations around education and mental health. The question highlights how children are homogenised and stripped of crucial embodied features (such as racialised positionings) that shape their lives and experiences. Luqman's comments are indicative of how the educational needs of the majority of children in Rochdale are dismissed, since minoritised students are being educated by White middle-class English teachers while their schools are being racialised and portrayed as “not good” because the majority of students are Pakistani. Such narrations highlight how structural racism has been present, apparent, and exacerbated by the pandemic for both adults and children in Rochdale.
Whose Health Matters? Lockdown and Racist Ideologies
Markers such as “childhood” and “mental health,” when applied and understood outside of a historical, material, and intersectional context, risk depoliticising wider historical and socioeconomic inequalities whilst psychologising issues of “mental health.” Bringing child as method in dialogue with border as method refocuses how Rochdale, the context and town where our research was based, is bordered and racialised. We offer here an example from Raheela and Nazir, the working-class grandparents and carers of their divorced son's children, who spoke in Urdu (translated by the lead researcher): So, on the one hand, you [councils/government] preach safety, and on the other hand, you are permitting people to mingle. People can go to pubs and do whatever. So, we feel like these extra rules are only for the Muslims. The White people are doing whatever and have no such restrictions. Shouldn’t the rule be the same for everyone? The White people here [Rochdale] are walking around without masks. But then we people are being told that people from our [Pakistani Muslim] Rochdale community are the ones who are spreading and most affected by the virus.
From the Playground: Transgenerational Experiences of Racism
Historical forms of racism and oppression thus come to deconstruct the discourse of “mental health crisis,” showing it to be much more than “children's mental health.” It becomes an expression of the intergenerational reproduction of racism across many contexts of social and cultural life. When the lead researcher asked Luqman, “What would you say that would help you and your family if I spoke to Rochdale Council and took your issues to them?” the participant responded: Nothing can be done. They will never make any change. I will give you an example. I have been playing football for 30-odd years. Back in the 70s and 80s in Rochdale, there was a National Front [party]. They had one of their headquarters in Rochdale. The people that were part and parcel of the National Front were a racist group. We were all playing in the football teams that … would play against [them]. Now, when I was 15- and 16-year-old, when I joined my club, it was an all-Asian Pakistani group of friends, local in Deeplish, that formed a team and put the team in the leagues. So, we ended up playing against this White team on a Saturday. So now the only Pakistani team in the whole of the North West, in fact, we probably would have been the first Asian team in the country that had developed a club, the amount of racism, the amount of abuse, the number of fights, the number of times that we ended up being called in by the leagues, the number of times it happened over several years … it just went on and on and on. And it was pure and utter racist players. So, I was a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old playing a game. In those days, we had long hair. So, a tackle would happen, and you would end up on the floor. They would put their foot on your hair and in front of the referee call you a Black bastard and spit on you. You turn to the referee to say: “Ref, look!” The referee would say, “What's your problem? You are a Black bastard, aren’t you?” And it's like ok, and then a fight would happen. We would get called into the league and in front of you are sat four, five working men officials who you are answerable to. So, they say “why did you start fighting?” So, the fight started because that guy called that guy a Black bastard and before you know, he spit on me. And the referee doesn’t do anything about it. The referee called us a Black bastard as well! So, four people are sitting there looking at each other, and they say, “What's your problem?” So, this was in the 70s and 80s. Now the significance of this is this: I grew up going into my 20s, my 30s, my 40s playing football, and in all those years, those players that we played against became referees, and they became officials, and part and parcel of the organisation. So, it is systemic in the system … prejudice and racism exist in the system. These are the same people in charge of the football association now, and I have seen the same pedigree of people sitting in front of me asking the same bastard questions that I got asked 20, 30 years ago even though they dress differently, even though they are cautious in their language. But they are saying, “Well, you are a bastard. What's your problem?”
In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon (2008) engages with the epidermalisation of inferiority as an internalisation of colonial oppression. What Luqman describes is not simply a matter of racialisation and, of course, racism. It is an embodied racialised experience transformed into a structural, societal, and everyday material reality (and vice versa) that multiplies forms of bordering. Brown and Black bodies become the epidermalised signifier of both exploited psyches and labour, as in the previous extract, where transgenerational oppression marks inherent structural injustices. Such forms of bordering not only demonstrate the enactment of racist divisive practices (in football teams, associations, and leagues) of the kind taken up by various national antiracist campaigns such as Kick the Racism Out of Football (https://www.kickitout.org), they also reflect how area by area, from education, to school, to sports as a significant arena of local companionship, to “mental health” together link spatiality (as in who can play football, who can work and in which positions, who lives in Rochdale) with forms of bordering (the material divisive rules that mark presence in education, schools, work, etc.).
The discourse of “mental health crisis” therefore disregards, whitewashes, waters down, and psychologises wider entangled and interconnected (historical and current) transgenerational forms of institutional and carceral suffering. As commentators have acknowledged (e.g., Laubscher et al., 2021), Fanon (2001, 2008) showed the embodied, psychic impacts of systemic-structural and material colonial oppression. Such oppressions cannot be overcome by simply introducing “talking therapies” or “mental health” interventions because these, too, risk reiterating as well as denying those same systemic inequalities. Rather, colonial oppression is a site of struggle for material, psychic, and bodily liberation. As Luqman ironically comments, “even though they are cautious in their language. But they are saying, ‘Well, you are a bastard.’”
In a recent exploration of child as method and Fanon, Cassal et al. (2024) argue that Fanon can also be seen as a theorist of childhood. When Fanon (1970) calls for the “youth of Africa” to fight for liberation, he positions children, or “the youth,” as a force of and for liberation (see also Burman, 2019). By contrast, according to the “mental health crisis” and COVID-19, children are seen as disempowered and victimised subjects, as a population in need of intervention to ensure their psychic stability and well-functioning, thus recapitulating the deficit developmentalism of mainstream psychology (Burman, 2017). But what remains unclear is whether this is for children or rather to bolster prevailing narratives and agendas where children's needs are capitalised upon to address wider societal concerns. While the narratives in our study were from adults who were mostly parents of school-aged children, we suggest these demonstrate how the research analytic of child as method prompts attention to historical forms of oppression and neocolonial impositions of power. Hence, what otherwise could have been seen as a piece of “educational” or “psychological” research calling for attention and intervention in schools and children, extends analysis to other levels.
“Unlocking” Intersections of Gender and Race
Our fourth example offers a final look at how the lockdown, together with the “mental health crisis” discourse, obscured accounts of long-standing classed, racialised, and gendered experiences of oppression. Another cis female working-class participant, Sameera, who has lived in Rochdale for 20 years with her mother, father-in-law, husband, and two children, and spoke in her first language, Urdu, said: I have been in lockdown for 20 years … but in this lockdown, I feel suffocated … kids are completely bored … they have no aim … Us, Asian women are not affected much by lockdown, but the kids are affected. Us, Asian women are usually in a lockdown, but now I feel depressed … You are told you can’t go out … You are even scared of your own shadow … They [the council] should open the [voluntary local] centres. [Asian women] get depressed doing the same thing over and over again. So, if they go out and speak to someone, if nothing else, you get ready. Because when you are at home, you don’t even wash your face, because you think you aren’t going anywhere. Sometimes, you don’t even know what day it is. It has become an aimless life. When you go out, you share your worries with someone.
Sameera discussed how the lockdown affected her, ushering in a feeling of being “suffocated.” From an intersectional perspective, “women” are not a single homogeneous category as in the discourse of humanitarian emergencies (Burman, 2008; Sylvester, 1998). Indeed, this conflation of women and children into one group signals and, in a way, justifies not only the infantilisation, vulnerabilisation, and victimisation of women, but also reinscribing childcare responsibility to them. As indicated above, given how transgenerational oppression and racism manifested, not “all women” experienced COVID-19 in the same way, even as they may have faced similar gendered demands (also including gender-based violence; Foster et al., 2022).
Sameera's comments highlight both the strength and struggle of “Asian women” (thereby enacting a homogenisation that can perhaps be understood within the relational dynamics of the consultation, to include Sophina Choudry as interviewer). She says she is unaffected by the lockdown yet contradicts herself almost immediately. The psychologised language, “[Asian women] get depressed doing the same thing over and over again,” invites a decolonial feminist approach to how the pandemic and mental health discourses position women and children.
Taking into consideration the historical marginality, racism, and oppression that communities in Rochdale have experienced, Sameera's account testifies to how the research and policy focus around “mental health” and COVID-19 for racialised people is limited when it stops at how the local councils’ and government's responses have affected “womenandchildren.” We read Sameera's response via child as method and border as method to indicate how, on the one hand, patriarchy intensifies women's marginality and oppression alongside childcaring responsibilities and, on the other, how racialised women deal with social markers such as race and racism where the lockdown measures not only intensified but also paradoxically mitigated historically constructed traditional gendered positionings of marginality and oppression.
Conclusion
The contribution of this article lies, first, in highlighting how more than just “children” and “mental health” are involved for people and communities that have been historically marginalised and racialised (see Giacaman, 2018). We have argued that the “child mental health crisis” before, amid, and after the pandemic brought to the fore not only transgenerational but also lived experiences of oppression and racism embedded in the histories and continuing legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. It also highlighted how Whiteness (in the sense of dominant institutional structures of privilege) interplays to obscure these constitutive conditions, including as enacted via dominant discourses of the “child mental health crisis.”
Secondly, we have suggested how “child,” “mental health,” and “crisis” become tropes that homogenise childhood, children, and adults, and depoliticise and psychologise oppression, especially racism and other inequalities, thereby overlooking and leaving unaddressed the matrix of historical, systemic, structural, and current forms of oppression. In this way, not only do such tropes obscure and ignore social and political conditions, but when they do, they further psychologise issues of racism, constructing these as issues of “mental health.” Significantly, none of our participants asked for mental health or other interventions. On the contrary, their focus was on how racism manifests and impacts their lives. In other words, while the discourse on “child mental health” and “crisis” may perform as an attempt to promote sensitivity, support, and care for and about children, according to our analysis, this appears to obscure and reproduce both gross and intimate forms of racialised and gendered, as well as generational, oppression and marginalisation.
Third, the research analytic child as method was used to explore how discourses around children and childhood, even where not explicitly topicalised in our material, work to organise narratives around children and childhood (see also Burman, 2024; Cassal, 2024). It is precisely here that child as method reconfigures the national and international policy focus around “crisis,” the pandemic, and “child mental health,” showing how it works to distract from and erase multiple forms of historical marginality and racist and gendered oppression for both adults and children. Through such analysis, this article has highlighted the occlusion of how structural racism underpins aspects of everyday life across school, education, and health contexts, as well as sports, labour, and living amid the pandemic settings. The child mental health discourse reproduces the abstracted figure of the child in Western culture, thus psychologising social, historical, and political issues of everyday life. In doing so, it overlooks and depoliticises into a psychological discourse how transgenerational experiences of marginality—across class, gender, and racialised positionings—infused matters of life, health, and death before, during, and after the pandemic.
Hence, the question about which children the discourse on “child mental health” addresses, emerges as central because it exposes how class status and Whiteness underpin the way discourses of “children,” “childhood,” and “mental health” work within Western culture. Marginalities are not only divisive characteristics within and between communities of adults and children; as shown by the research analytic border as method, divisions or borders divide, and increase for the privileged, resources and labour. This was apparent in the words of Luqman, who described how “Asians” (as he put it) comprised the majority of vital but low-paid education and social care workers, as teaching assistants and cleaners. As such, “child mental health” and “crisis” discourses not only reflect how neoliberalism functions for and about children. They also depict how racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018, 2023), which is historically and politically built upon colonial and imperial frames, continues to exploit, extract and mark day by day, some bodies and communities. The psychic burden this creates, as Fanon (2001, 2008) highlights, cannot be lifted by nor confined to discourses of “mental health,” whether of children or adults. Rather, psychic liberation can only be achieved alongside social justice and collective liberation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Our friend, mentor, and colleague Prof. Julian Williams sadly passed away during the review process of this paper. We wish to acknowledge and deeply appreciate his invaluable contributions not only to this work but also to various fields, most notably, cultural historical Marxism, mathematics education, social theories of learning, political education, and activism. Julian was a dedicated scholar, comrade, and activist. His presence, intellect, and passion will be profoundly missed.
Funding
This article draws on research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Account (UK) and the School of Environment, Education, and Development (SEED) Impact Fund, The University of Manchester (UK).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author Biographies
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