Affective geographies of adolescent young people’s wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic
Affective geographies of adolescent young people’s wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic

Summary/Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic and measures put in place to contain the spread of Sars-Cov-2 virus have limited and changed the ways in which people around the world use space. In this paper, we look at how young people’s affective geographies of wellbeing have been reconfigured by the Covid-19 pandemic. Building on visual and textual data from a photovoice workshop with fourteen adolescent young people (aged 15-18) from a high-school in North-West Romania held in the fall of 2021, we show how both domestic and public outdoor spaces were reshaped by the public health crisis and by measures put in place to control it. Our findings point to the fact that the relationship between digital and domestic spaces has become even more blurred through the incorporation of educational and socializing activities within digital-domestic spaces. Furthermore, we point to the reconfiguration of relationships between young people and non-human others, especially animals that they share domestic spaces with, as well as other household and family members. Finally, we show that adolescent young people came to claim the use of outdoor public spaces as a prosaic form of everyday resistance in their quest for wellbeing. Spaces such as hypermarket and gas station parking lots, (unused) school courtyards and deserted stadiums came to be used by young people as clandestine spaces in which to socialize and to do sports.

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