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VR games like VRChat offer players the opportunity to construct avatars mirroring their real-world identity, encompassing various facets including makeup, fashion style, body proportions and skin tone. This chapter explores how the real-life identity of players and the persona crafted within VRChat are related to one another and to what extent the avatar relates to self-perception. Avatar appearance can significantly affect how individuals interact with others in virtual environments. Appearance can also affect the degree to which the player can use the digital space for self-expression. Expressing self-identity through avatar design is therefore critical in establishing embodiment and presence in VR environments. Avatar design influences how individuals form social connections, build relationships and collaborate online, increasingly important in VR games like VRChat. Utilising Goffman's theory of self-presentation, this chapter draws on interview data from 20 VRChat users to understand the motivations and influences affecting avatar design. These choices are assessed in the context of creating an embodied actor in VR. The interview findings emphasise the role of avatar customisation in manifesting users' ideas of their authentic selves in the virtual realm. Supported by survey data, the insights highlight users' motivations based on personality traits, interests, social and personal identities, and cultural aesthetics derived from real-life experiences. This chapter underscores the complex interplay between real and virtual identities, highlighting the significant influence of cultural and social foundations on identity manifestation within VR environments.

Far from being ‘a great equaliser’, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing inequities and produced new ones. Yet, in the face of the multiple crises which the COVID-19 pandemic amplified, including a crisis of care, novel imaginaries and practices emerged to navigate the instability it wrought. For instance, although children were largely out of focus during the pandemic, when they appeared in discussions it was often along well-worn paths bound up in the chameleon-like figure of the child as the risk and at-risk. Yet by paying close attention to children's own experiences, we can see multiple examples of their care for and about Others. I make the case that this care was radical in the context of Coronavirus, not least because the tropes of the risky or at-risk child threatened to fracture possibilities of intergenerational solidarities necessary for navigating the pandemic and important for addressing widespread injustices.

Far from being united under the banner of sisterhood, American women opposed each other on the issue of gender equality in the 1970s–1980s. As the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed the US Congress in 1972, antifeminists mobilized under the lead of Phyllis Schlafly to prevent its ratification. Identified as major threat to traditional families, the ERA would have mandated that “equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex” (section 1). If this sociocultural and political struggle around women's rights revealed the different loyalties and interests of women at the time, it also testified to the institutional fragmentation of power in the country. Conservative women were not only fighting against feminism to preserve the privileged position they thought they occupied in the patriarchy; they were also animated by a strong anti-federal government sentiment. A combined examination of these antifeminist and anti-governmental stances reveals some the reasons why the ERA was eventually never added to the Constitution and could also explain why the United States is such a disunited country, especially regarding women's rights.

This introductory chapter provides the context for this edited collection: Care and Coronavirus: Perspectives on Children, Youth and Families which aims to understand care in the context of COVID-19, the practices, experiences and potential futures of it for children, young people and families. In this chapter, the authors begin by exploring COVID-19 and its implications for children, young people and families. This includes a consideration of how particular discourses of childhood and youth often led to the marginalisation of children in care policy and practice during the lockdown periods. The authors then discuss interdisciplinary literature on care to identify directions in policy, practice and research, drawing attention to the political nature of care and the need for scholars of childhood, youth and family to engage with these critical and political approaches to care. The authors argue that developments in the field of Childhood Studies can be brought into productive dialogue with care to forge new ways of thinking through care and childhood. The final part of the chapter provides an overview of the ensuing chapters and concludes with the implications of this work for future research, policy and practice. The authors argue that COVID-19 heightened the attention paid to care and the ways in which care is vital for the maintenance of ourselves and the world around us, while also cautioning about the inequalities and the commodification of care that was revealed in these times. The authors end with a call for reflection on the failures and successes of caring during the pandemic and in its aftermath so we might plan a more caring, hopeful future.