Introduction

Breathing is a function so fundamental to life that most of the time its significance goes unrecognised; yet the absence of the ability to breathe freely is a reality for many. The recent global COVID-19 pandemic – which particularly affects the lungs – has exposed an intersection of pandemic and capitalism in which some bodies are affected more than others; research findings show that people of the global majority have been disproportionately impacted by coronavirus (University of Manchester, 2020). Simultaneously, the death of George Floyd, and the pain of his final words, ‘I can't breathe’, has shown how the life-breath of some humans is more valued than that of others.

This chapter draws on bell hooks’ (1994: 130) notion of critical dialogue; a practice that involves ‘individuals who occupy different locations … mapping out terrains of commonality, connection and shared concern’. For hooks coming together in the spirit of beloved community requires us to cross borders, thereby enriching each other's knowledge. As educators at either ends of the spectrum of privilege and oppression (Author A is a white female academic, and Author B an activist-writer of colour), we have used this dialogic space to explore the intersection of pandemic and inequality. By making the choice to write anonymously, we have also made a deliberate effort to detach from the ego associated with academic writing, and we invite others to adopt a similar dialogic model by which to converse as equals (privilege and structural inequalities notwithstanding).

We begin from a series of questions: Who is able to breathe? Why are some individuals afforded ‘breathing space’ and not others? What can we learn from the necropolitics of the pandemic (Mbembe and Corocoran, 2019), and how might we utilise this knowledge to take action for affirmative social change in education? We then explore the role of education in making change and conclude by reflecting on the role of dialogic processes in furthering and enriching understanding.

Whether denied, derided or determined to overcome it, COVID-19 has impacted many lives in ways that we are only now beginning to witness, as we move from old configurations of normality and adapt to new realities, be it flexible ways of working and learning or working to change social systems. It is also evident that COVID-19 extends beyond a global health problem. Sociocultural readings of the pandemic have pointed to this as a crisis on multiple levels – economic, environmental, social, cultural and racial. It, then, becomes an important task to understand how this crisis has affected, and continues to affect, people across the world, through readings that do not lean into othering and moralism, as is often the main societal response, and as we have seen throughout this text.

With no end yet in sight, COVID-19 and its variants – from the South African variant to Omicron then to Omicron BA.4 to BA.5 – are still widespread and affecting the lives and health of many people. And amid the political and social turmoil of summer 2022, as the populace contends with strikes by railway workers and barristers, the cost of living crisis and the political turbulences of the British government, we must remember and be ever vigilant of the impact of the rampant racism evident in our society. In the early days of the pandemic, the COVID variants were not referred to by scientific nomenclature but by the site of origin – for example COVID-19's origins in China, then the South African strain, then the Indian strain. This associated racialisation of a virus was intriguing to observe, since it resurrected and reinforced the trope of dirty unclean foreigner/outsider/subaltern, and drew implicit links between biology and race. The naming of the variants by country of origin was eventually dropped in favour of scientific nomenclature. This may have occurred as someone, somewhere, realised that the links between the easy and lazy association of the new variant by country of origin could reinforce certain racial stereotypes. But the damage had already been done. So, while at the same time living with and suffering from the virus, Black and global majority people have suffered insulting microaggressions associated with the early identification of the COVID-19 virus variants, and simultaneously been lost to the virus in greater numbers. The saying ‘adding insult to injury’ jumps to mind.

On 31 December 2019, the world began to hear murmurs from the Chinese authorities and the World Health Organization (WHO) of the novel coronavirus, a mysterious new virus strain that had never been identified in humans. By 30 January 2020, WHO labelled SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) as a public health emergency of international concern. It did not take long (11 March 2020) for the widespread and rapidly evolving virus to be declared, a global pandemic.

If a pandemic is defined as ‘a novel infection – new and previously unconfronted – that spreads globally and results in a high incidence of morbidity (sickness) and mortality (death)’, deriving ‘from pan – across, and demos, meaning people or population’ (Doherty, 2013: 42), the new virus in this instance became confronted with an old one that has historical roots and continual contemporary manifestations – and that is the virus of racism. The antagonism, discrimination and prejudice directed against an individual of another race based on one's perceived racial superiority is not novel by any means. However, the histories of racism in the global North and South have never been more visible than in these pandemic times. Indeed, the impact of the latter on existing inequalities is wide-reaching, with reverberations felt worldwide. Even after three years since the arrival of COVID-19, many of the outcomes from these inequalities have been shown to be more exacerbated and devastating, particularly along the lines of race and ethnicity.

Global media discourses and scholarly debates have revealed over the course of 2020 onwards the role structural racism has played in perpetuating racial inequalities, and its impacts on Black and global majority groups has been laid bare. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst of many existing and intersectional issues globally, and it was with this in mind that the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality (CRED) at Leeds Beckett University initially issued a call for rapid response papers on the racial impacts of the coronavirus. More widely, we identified an emerging racist rhetoric of blaming and shaming Black, Asian and Minority ethnic groups, for instance in the conversations on vaccine hesitancy, higher COVID-19 incidence in Black communities, the labelling of the virus as the ‘Chinese virus’ and the ‘Indian variant’, to enumerate just a few examples.

For decades, symbolic models of cognition were the dominant computational approaches of cognition. Today they coexist with subsymbolic, statistical, and hybrid models, but they are still the de facto standard for modeling human reasoning processes. This chapter summarizes important aspects of symbolic and hybrid models of cognition, approaching the topic from different perspectives. After some discussion on historical aspects and the theoretical basis of symbolic models of cognition, cognitive architectures as models for intelligent agents are examined. Subsequently, the role of symbolic computational approaches towards processing natural language, representation of human knowledge, and commonsense reasoning are considered. Then the focus is put on the crucial question of learning new representations and theories, before finally looking at hybrid and neural-symbolic systems combining reasoning and learning and bridging between symbolic and subsymbolic elements.