‘You are stealing our future’: towards powerful methodologies to explore youth climate activism

With humanity facing existential threat, youth have made their voices heard as never before on the issue of climate and ecological breakdown. In March 2019, more than 1.6 million young people took to the streets across the globe to demand action on climate change (Fisher, 2019). As educational researchers we have a duty to listen to them. The transition to a sustainable future is an exercise in world-building (Bowman, 2019), in which education plays a key role. For UK-based researchers in particular, with COP26 planned this year in Glasgow, the eyes of the world are looking our way and the clock is ticking.

This presentation will demonstrate how participatory approaches to research can amplify youth voice, by presenting findings from a study which used a methodology inspired by narrative inquiry. The intention is not to advocate for the particular methods of the study presented, rather it points towards the possibilities for imagining new approaches with world-building potential. While the study discussed here was limited in scope (partly due to the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic), the conclusions drawn are considered valid and relevant for further investigation into youth engagement in climate action and the implications for educational research more broadly.
Before presenting the study, this presentation will address the ever-changing framing of youth in the political sphere; at times youth are portrayed as marginalized, at other times as citizens with agency (Thew, et al., 2020; O'Brien, et al., 2019). Holmberg and Alvinius (2020) point to this contradiction within UN materials, which frame young people as both vulnerable victims and as crucial agents of change. Furthermore, young people’s self-perceptions can be seen to change over time and this alters the types of justice claims made by the youth (Thew, et al., 2020). The lack of clarity regarding youth’s political standing has direct implications for the power they hold. As educators and researchers, we retain a certain amount of influence through our roles in institutions. Hence, we have a responsibility not only in envisaging possible futures with the youth of today (Bowman, 2019) but also in implementing the necessary changes and using our power where they have none. We must begin by actively listening to them. This requires the development of new approaches to academic research on youth climate activism, which avoid the propensity of adult researchers to impose inadequate binary framings which fail to capture the complexity of young people’s politics (Bowman, 2019; Bowman, 2020).
Subsequently, the presentation will explore how the Youth Strike 4 Climate (YS4C) movement has successfully used a powerful narrative to mobilise youth activists on a global scale against the perceived inaction of world leaders in the face of an existential threat. The meta-narrative, which draws on emotive language and concepts of inter-generational justice, has been conceptualised by Han and Ahn (2020) using the narrative policy framework approach. Their conceptualisation will be drawn on here; for the purposes of this study, it has been termed the ‘stolen future’ narrative.

At this point, the researcher’s own 2020 study will be presented. In this study, the meta-narrative conceptualisation served as a framework through which to investigate the vital components of the YS4C story and to imagine the lifespace of the narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Subsequently, the lived experiences of five participants from Bristol YS4C are explored through narrative inquiry. Through the analysis of the five narratives, comparisons are drawn between the meta-narrative and the lived experiences of the individuals. It is found that the stories as told by the participants provide a richer and more contextualised understanding of the lived realities of the activists than the meta-narrative offers. The findings reveal conflicting self-perceptions among the young people, as well as gaps in emotional intelligence. The meta-narrative is shown to rely on reductionistic rhetoric which oversimplifies the message of the movement. Furthermore, other such tendencies to diminish the demands of youth climate activists are addressed, such as the excessive focus on slogans such as ‘listen to science’ (Evensen, 2019). The level of nuance evident in the findings demonstrates the need for open participatory methods of research which place the emphasis on real lived experiences and attend to issues of place, sociality and temporality. From these findings, next steps are proposed, in which educational researchers are encouraged to build on the experiences of youth climate activists in the collaborative task of world-building.

References
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Clandinin, D. J. & Connelly, F. M., 2000. Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. 1st ed. San Francisco, Ca.: Jossey-Bass..
Evensen, D., 2019. The rhetorical limitations of the #FridaysForFuture movement. Nature Climate Change, 9(6), p. 428–430.
Fisher, D. R., 2019. The broader importance of #FridaysForFuture. Nature Climsate Change, Volume 9, p. 430–431.
Han, H. & Ahn, S. W., 2020. Youth Mobilization to Stop Global Climate Change: Narratives and Impact. Sustainability , 12(10), p. 4127.
Holmberg, A. & Alvinius, A., 2020. Children’s protest in relation to the climate emergency: A qualitative study on a new form of resistance promoting political and social change. Childhood , 27(1), p. 78–92 .
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Thew, H., Middlemiss, L. & Paavola, J., 2020. Youth is not a political position”: Exploring justice claims-making in the UN Climate Change Negotiations. Global Environmental Change, 61(102036,).