Intergenerational Caring Agencies in Youth Climate Activism

Keywords: Youth, care, intergenerational geographies, climate change, political agency
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 4/9/2021 03:05 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/9/2021 04:20 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

This paper, a chapter of my dissertation, explores the ways in which U.S. and transnational youth climate movements articulate and politicize notions of intergenerational and interspecies care in their work. Drawing on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with activists, social media analysis and digital archival research, this piece examines the work of four transnational youth climate networks – the Sunrise Movement, Our Children’s Trust, the YOUNGO network and School Strikes for Climate – as they intervene within adult-dominated governance institutions to compel action on climate change. Following Bartos (2012), I focus on the ways in which these youth movements articulate “care for their worlds,” simultaneously emplacing themselves within expansive notions of “intergenerational time” (Whyte, 2018) and ‘more-than-human’ caring networks (Schrader, 2015). I demonstrate how these counter-hegemonic animations of space-time contest the neoliberal “short-termism” (Fitz-Henry, 2017) of adultist institutions and draw insights about how these movements enrich understandings of youth political agencies in childhood and youth geographies.

References

References
Bartos, A. E. (2012). Children caring for their worlds: The politics of care and childhood. Political Geography, 31(3), 157–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.12.003

Fitz-Henry, E. (2017). Multiple Temporalities and the Nonhuman Other. Environmental Humanities, 9(1), 1–17. http://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3829109

Schrader, A. (2015). Abyssal intimacies and temporalities of care: How (not) to care about deformed leaf bugs in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Social Studies of Science, 45(5), 665–690. http://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715603249

Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1, 251484861877762. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514