‘They don’t quite understand the importance of what we’re doing today’: the young people’s climate strikes as subaltern activism

Abstract

Background Youth-led movements like #FridaysforFuture and the school strikes for climate (henceforth referred to as the climate strikes) are leading calls for action on climate change worldwide. This paper reports on a thematic analysis of protest signs, and interviews with young climate strikers, at a climate strike in Manchester, UK, in 2019. Results This paper explores the ways in which dominant, adult-centred frameworks for conceptualizing young people’s environmental activism tend to obscure the complexities of the climate strike movement. In contrast, this study examines the complex political activism of climate strikers as a ‘subaltern group’, who take political action in a wider context of intersecting categories of oppression and marginalization – including youth as a category of marginalization – and in the historical context of environmental racism, the enduring legacies of colonialism, and global inequality during contemporary capitalism. Conclusions The article develops a theoretical model for future research, based on a model of two constraining frames that limit analysis of the climate strikes in particular and young people’s environmental activism in general. This paper contributes to a step change in methods for the study of this remarkable movement in a global context.

Constructs of childhood, generation and heroism in editorials on young people's climate change activism: Their mobilisation and effects

“…As some young climate activists have stressed, they are a part of a broad movement of diverse, long-term, interconnected and cross-generational people and supports that recognises the relevance of historical and ongoing injustices and their links to environmental destruction (e.g. Bowman, 2020;Hirsh, 2020;Almahdi, 2019; see also Bent's 2020 discussion of Emma Gonzalez). Young climate activists have also emphasised the importance of recognising and addressing inequalities in more mainstream climate change activism.…”

“We need to make our voices heard”: Claiming space for young people’s everyday environmental politics in northern Finland

“…Inspired by recent discussions on young people's environmental citizenship (Wood & Kallio 2019) and political participation (Bowman 2020;Holmberg & Alvinius 2019;Ojala 2012;Piispa & Myllyniemi 2019), this paper offers regional, rural, and mundane perspectives on the topic of young people's everyday environmental politics, a subject that has been studied primarily in the context of political activism and climate strike movements in urban areas. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews among 15-16-year-old youths in rural and urban northern Finland, this paper asks: how young people's environmental politics unfolds in their everyday lives and what forms of inertial friction are connected to their political participation.…”

“…The conventional notions of Politics and political participation are often defined as public, formal or institutional, and refer to public issues managed collectively through formal institutions by politicians and adults. Within this adult-centred framework (Skelton 2010), young people are marginal, although not totally excluded actors: taking part in planning or decision-making (Hadfield-Hill & Christensen 2019), lobbying, organizing demonstrations, or going on a school strike (Bowman 2020) illustrate the ways in which young people can take action to influence the formal-public sphere.…”

Environmental attunement in the health and physical education canon: emplaced connection to embodiment, community and ‘nature’

“…In more recent times, where the current popular discourse fuelling the 'sustainability' and 'going green' movement has become an overriding social and economic zeitgeist; climate change and the environment are a central priority of ongoing political and public debate. While some companies are re-shaping a green-economy, the fashionability associated with symbolic corporate environmentalism of green products especially linked to health and wellness markets, referred to as 'greenwashing' (Bowen, 2014) exemplifies the ways individual citizenry is associated with commercialisation and cultural environmentalism virtues. But as Treanor (2010) argues, Atomistic individuals cannot solve environmental crises; the commons is ruined even if a significant percentage of its inhabitants live sustainably … environmentalism must come to be thought of in terms that are explicitly and unavoidably political.…”