Chapter 14: Realtime Ruminations: Young Children’s Thoughts on Social Life in 2020

One of the last articles I published before the coronavirus pandemic began was an essay in response to the Presidential Address that Thea Abu El-Haj delivered to the Council of Anthropology and Education (CAE) during the 2018 American Anthropological Association meeting. As I sat to write this essay late in November of 2020, I was also facilitating virtual CAE sessions replacing the in-person annual meeting typically held during that same week. My 2019 essay––Allá Sobre el Horizonte/There Over the Horizon––serves as my entry point here because it makes the case that visual metaphors, like lines and circles, help us all make sense of the complexity of social relationships. For example, straight lines can indicate thresholds delineating social boundaries between people. Meanwhile, circles can denote social reproduction or refer to models of grassroots organizing used in struggles for justice.