No abstract

This paper documents a collaborative, multi-site participatory action research project in collaboration with children to act on climate change within local community settings. The project was an after-school program that combined hands-on climate change educational activities with photovoice, a participatory action research method that uses digital photography as the basis for problem identification, group dialogue, and social change action. Grounded in transformative sustainability learning theory and integrated with an arts-based participatory action research methodology, the program was designed to strengthen children's climate change awareness and sense of agency through youth-led action projects. After describing the program, this article details the collaborative action projects designed and carried out by 10-to 12-year-olds in each community (e.g., policy advocacy, tree-planting, community garden) as well as how the program facilitated children's constructive climate change engagement through children's enjoyment and agentic action. The critical importance of participatory process and collaborative action in strengthening children's sense of agency is discussed.

Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) that include interdisciplinary, engagement‐oriented, and collaborative experiences have the potential to benefit students in unique ways. Through these innovative experiences, students are able to see the social impact and importance of their work—a factor known to strengthen the academic and career persistence of students traditionally underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. In the present study, students assumed simultaneous roles as students, interdisciplinary researchers, and community liaisons as they facilitated a community‐engaged participatory research project. Using interpretive phenomenological analysis, we explore students’ evolving perspectives of knowledge generation and social change processes before, during, and after the URE. Findings emphasize participants’ altered views of the respective roles of academic researchers and community members in generating knowledge, the value of interdisciplinary research, and the potential of innovative UREs to foster positive change—in academic and community contexts.

This manuscript explores the possibilities and challenges of art–science integration in facilitating collaborative sustainability action in local settings. To date, much sustainability education is prescriptive, rather than participatory, and most integrated art–science programming aims for content learning, rather than societal change. What this means is that learners are more often taught “what is” than invited to imagine “what if?” In order to envision and enact sustainable alternatives, there is a need for methods that allow community members, especially young people, to critically engage with the present, imagine a better future, and collaboratively act for sustainability today. This manuscript introduces a methodological framework that integrates the arts and sciences to facilitate: (1) transdisciplinary learning, focusing on local sustainability challenges; (2) participatory process, bringing experience-based knowledge into conversation with research-based knowledge; and (3) collaborative sustainability action, inviting community members to envision and enact sustainable alternatives where they live. The transformative potential of this framework is examined through international case studies from countries representing the richest and poorest in the Western hemisphere: a multi-site research study and after-school program for climate change education and action in collaboration with children in the Western US; and a multi-cycle research study and community arts center course for environmental photography and youth-led water advocacy in Southern Haiti. Despite many shared characteristics, case studies diverge in important ways relative to the sustainability challenges they sought to address, the specific context in which activities took place, and the manner in which art–science integration was practiced. Across cases, however, art–science integration facilitated participants’ learning, connection, and action for sustainability. Framed by the shared aims of transdisciplinary approaches, this manuscript discusses methodological hurdles and practical lessons learned in art–science integration across settings as well as the transformative capacity of alternative pedagogical and research practices in building a sustainable future.

Psychological contributions to social movement scholarship have disproportionately concentrated on a "politics of demand", rather than on a "politics of the act", or prefigurative politics. Prefigurative actors, rather than making demands of power-holders, take direct action aimed at creating change in the ‘here and now’ by constructing alternative modes of being and interacting that reflect a given movement’s desired social transformations. Given that the prefigurative process takes place within and between individuals—with aims of changing the macrostructure by altering micro-relations—psychological perspectives are imperative to their understanding. Despite relevant theories and concepts, a psychology of prefiguration has yet to emerge. This theoretical discussion explores several reasons why prefigurative practices have been largely overlooked and at times misunderstood within mainstream social movement scholarship, traces the distinctive dimensions of prefiguration deserving of further (especially psychological) inquiry, and calls for methodological techniques both responsive to the context-driven nature of prefigurative praxis and consistent with the ‘bottom-up’ approach embodied within these unique spaces of resistance. After highlighting important points of disjuncture and possibility within the study of prefiguration, this discussion offers critical questions and methods aimed to envision and invigorate a critical psychology of prefigurative politics.