Children’s spaces in pages: Examining spatiality in COVID-19-themed children’s books

Abstract

This article examines spatiality in selected children’s books about COVID-19. Spatiality is an important lens because the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis related to distancing and mobility restrictions—spatial matters. Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities was adopted as a framework to how children’s books present community belongingness within the spatial restrictions imposed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a content analysis of pandemic-related children’s books published in early 2020 (n = 51), this paper explores the sense of community in three everyday spaces: ‘inside’ (home), ‘outside’ (outdoors), and ‘in-betweens’ (windows and digital space). Findings reveal a two-fold observation: (1) children’s books show how the ‘normal’ in everyday space is disrupted; and (2) layers of imagined communities manifest within the everyday spaces depicted in the books examined. These findings offer insights that while children’s literature and geography are different disciplines, there is much to be explored about spaces in children’s lives from writers and illustrators of children’s books. Likewise, a geographical lens can substantiate discussions in children’s literature by unpacking relationships of characters based on the spaces they occupy. With these in mind, it is hoped that conversations about spatial discourses in children’s books flourish from this initial exploration.