A double bind: youth activism, climate change, and education

Abstract

The effects of climate change are becoming ever clearer. Young people’s participation in movements demanding action on climate change has grown and achieved new visibility. Yet the relations between climate change and education remain under-theorised. Such a theorisation should, we argue, take account of the current disconnection between climate change education and action, and the exclusion of the complex social, cultural, aesthetic and political effects of climate change from curricula. Further, it should consider a changed relation to young people as political subjects, that takes climate action as the moment and means of a more imaginative, interdisciplinary climate change education. Finally, we must confront the contradiction of such a climate change education to fundamental aspects of formal schooling including its governmental function. This special issue draws participants and contributions from across four continents and includes papers that take global or transnational perspectives and foreground the perspectives of Indigenous peoples. Its contributions engage with the problematic of climate change education by exploring the relationship between youth climate activism and education in terms of both education’s responsibility to foster generative encounters with young people whose futures will be conditioned by climate change, and the role of young people’s climate activism in disrupting and changing educational systems. Collectively the contributions pursue three broad lines of inquiry: (i) the dramatisation and visualisation of climate change for and by young people, (ii) the need for culturally responsive frameworks for climate change education, (iii) alternative pedagogical approaches that bring climate activism and education together.