Generation gaps, past and present

The temporal dislocation provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic has been widely acknowledged to have significant implications for young people, who were quickly labelled ‘the Covid generation’. This label lacks definitional rigour and reproduces the problems of ‘generationalism’ observable in previous forms of generational claimsmaking (Rudolph & Zacher, 2020). Nonetheless, its use raises two important questions. First, has the current period of accelerated social change, beginning with the upheavals provoked by the pandemic and followed by acute cultural, political, and geopolitical destabilisation, created the conditions for a distinctive generational consciousness (Mannheim, 1952 [1928]), in which children come of age in a world considered to be dramatically different to that taken for granted by their elders? Second, might the temporal and cultural dislocation observed during the present period give rise to a ‘generation gap’, of the kind observed following the First World War, and during the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s? This paper draws on an ongoing study of the discourse of the ‘Covid generation’ in media and policy narratives (Bristow & Gilland 2020, Bristow 2023, 2024), and a study of the experiences of the ‘Covid cohorts’ of university students in the UK (Potter et al, in progress), to analyse the implications of these questions for the sociology of knowledge.