Meeting the Physical Online: Thinking with Agential Realism About Digitally Entangled Becoming in the Time of Corona

The purpose of this chapter is to show how COVID-19 affected the lives of adolescents in Denmark. Focusing specifically on how the limitations to opportunities for physical activity materialized and became embodied, we describe what the pandemic did to adolescents’ bodies and their processes of becoming. Using Barad’s agential realist theory in conjunction with the narrative account of one Danish adolescent boy, we illustrate how the pandemic and the preventive measures put in place to stop the virus from spreading affected and continue to affect adolescents’ lives. In the context of the present study, the relational understandings of the nature of reality inspire a shifting of perspectives from one concerned with what the COVID-19 pandemic was and meant to a performative perspective that encourages us to take an interest in what COVID-19 did and still does.