Student Strike 4 Climate: Justice, emergency and citizenship

Youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research - commentary to Bowman

“…These narrow frameworks also give rise to limited notions of youth themselves and the ways they are understood as young citizens. Paying attention to the research methodologies we choose, the critical frameworks we use and the unintended consequences of how we report (such as those heightening feelings of helplessness and despair (see Thomas et al 2019 for more on this argument)), is one contribution we can make to…”

“…One of the most significant elements of the 2019 climate protests is that they were youth-led. This generated considerable interest in how young people, who had no experience of political organising, managed to co-ordinate national and global level protests of such scale (Thomas et al 2019). The novelty of this youth-led focus merited much attention and indeed more research is needed into how this movement was mobilised by young people within and across nations.…”

“…Youth are not isolated individuals and nor does their knowledge, skills and actions stem from a world removed from adults. Instead, it is more useful to see the strikes are part of a wider inter-generational globally-connected form of political organising (Thomas et al 2019) that has had a much longer presence than the events of 2019. This is challenging for researchers who struggle to adequately capture the community and intergenerational elements of young people's lives as this requires a more wholistic vision and significantly more time in the field than a one-off interview with a protesting individual.…”

“…This common approach focuses on an individual's own actions to reduce environmental and climate impacts -such as recycling, using reusable bags, reducing carbon footprint, eating less meat and so on. While this has some merits, it has been found to be closely associated with growing levels of 'eco-anxiety', guilt and despair amongst children, young people and climate activists (Christensen 2019;Lawton 2019;Nairn 2019;Thomas et al 2019). These prevailing and individualising anxieties make their way into how we research, with a good example being the Wahlström and colleagues (2019) report which overlooked the joyful and hopeful aspects of the climate strikes, focusing instead on anxiety, fear and hopelessness due to the narrow framing of the methodology (Bowman 2019).…”

To trust or not to trust? Young people’s trust in climate change science and implications for climate change engagement

“…(1) Climate change cannot be experienced directly by people, but needs to be mediated through scientific experts, and therefore everyone who relates to the climate problem must also relate to science (Cologna and Siegrist 2020;Lidskog 1996); (2) The main claim of the biggest climate change youth movement, Fridays for Future, is that politicians and other societal actors should 'listen to science,' meaning that science is at the core of this youth engagement (Thomas, Cretney, and Hayward 2019;Zulianello and Ceccobelli 2020); (3) Research about how young people cope with climate change shows that both those who use constructive and less constructive coping (seen from the perspective of engagement and well-being) relate to science (Ojala 2012a(Ojala , 2013Ojala and Bengtsson 2019). Youth are not passive victims of climate change worry but in fact actively cope.…”