‘The Oceans are Rising and So Are We’: Exploring Utopian Discourses in the School Strike For Climate Movement

Abstract

This article presents some provisional analysis of discourses presented by school students under the banner of the movements: Fridays for Future, Youth for Climate and School Strike 4 Climate. It contends that these movements go beyond just presenting a vision of an inescapable future, or a simplistic request for adults to listen to science. Instead, their vision is constructive of a better world as they challenge the failures of politicians, and arguably the adult public, demanding to play an active role in policy making when it comes to climate crisis. The article argues that this movement is constructed of a critical utopian discourse expressed through complex temporalities, which define the role of resistance as anticipation. It considers how the anxiety in the Student Strike movement creates a militant optimism, and the narratives of cathedral thinking are demonstrative of an open-ended utopian process.

Motivators of Participation and Non-Participation in Youth Environmental Protests

“…This was followed by expressions of solidarity with the movement, and social factors such as someone asking them to join were reported least likely. 10-15-year-old attendees in this study were asked to describe in their own words their reasons for attending (Collin et al, 2020): In addition to reporting sentiments of pressuring governments, they also worry about their futures, and this is consistent with other research in this area that has examined narratives of anxiety in the way young people discuss the Climate Strike (McKnight, 2020).…”

“…While it may be difficult to assess young people's level of climate change engagement (Partridge, 2008), they have been found on numerous occasions to be knowledgeable about climate (Lee et al, 2020), concerned (Bentley et al, 2004), and emotional about (Ojala, 2012) the realities of climate change. The Strikes have been shown to connect deeply with young people's climate anxieties (McKnight, 2020), reflecting young people's negative and pessimistic experiences with climate change (Han and Ahn, 2020).…”

“…Via the School Strike movement, young people are using political action to voice their concern for their futures and the environment (McKnight, 2020), which pushes back against the picture of a passive youth citizen, despite politics often being 'done to' young people rather than actively including them (Fyfe, 2009;Andersson, 2015). These Strikes distinctly focus on governmental entities or the "State" (de Moor et al, 2020a, p. 4) as important actors in mitigation of climate change, which appears at odds with prior research investigating youth locus of control in environmental care.…”

On the need for (con) temporary utopias: Temporal reflections on the climate rhetoric of environmental youth movements

“…Although climate-related concepts are used in the singular, much of the rhetoric of the environmental youth movements provides a challenge to the populist and postpolitical condition as the movements are bound up with other forms of oppression that the young generation is aware of, for example, colonialism (McKnight, 2020). Extinction Rebellion states that: "The human ecosystems have been damaged by a prevailing and dominating culture that has emerged.…”

Introduction

“…8 The future is central to another one of our articles: Heather McKnight's study of utopianism within the School Strike for Climate Change movement. 9 Analysing the speeches and statements given by a number of striking students and activists, McKnight suggests that 'the movement goes beyond just presenting a vision of an inescapable future, or a simple request for adults to listen to science. Instead, their vision is constructive of a better world'.…”