Narrativas infantis construídas diante da pandemia da Covid-19: histórias de experiências singulares e vivências desiguais analisadas em uma perspectiva decolonial

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned, especially in Brazil, into a social, economic, and political issue, given the existing structures of domination and the harmful political context in force. It’s understood that children, especially the most vulnerable, may have been especially affected by the pandemic, thus aggravating silencing. Based on the decolonial perspective, the existence of rigid social structures derived from coloniality is admitted; among them, adultcentrism, which, added to and superimposed on structures such as race, class, and gender, makeup arrangements of categories and crossings that affect the child's experience. Based on the understanding of the plurality of childhood, this qualitative research sought to discover narratives produced by different childhoods in Santa Maria/RS in the COVID-19 pandemic, providing spaces for listening and rescuing experiences. It had six participants, aged between seven and ten years who, through drawing, narratives, and storytelling, presented their experiences. The analyzes were based on the transcripts of the audios and the records of the researcher's experience diary, initially deriving from preliminary presentations of the respective research contexts. The results were grouped into four categories: “Representations about COVID-19”; “Access to school”; “Daily life and social life” and “Feelings”. The research revealed a great diversity of experiences related to the pandemic, in addition to the marked influence that social crossings, such as race and class, exert on children's experiences. The final considerations highlight the importance of listening and narratives in the construction of a decolonizing science and the potential that derives from the confluence between childhoods and narratives.