Politics of Disruption: Youth Climate Activisms and Education

Dear Colleagues,

Youth climate activisms have become a global phenomenon, and Politics of Disruption: Youth Climate Activisms and Education welcomes papers that address a multiplicity of youth activisms from a range of global contexts, as they interrogate current education systems and offer alternatives. Global youth climate strikes, also known as Fridays for Future, have driven much education inquiry thus far, particularly in the Global North. In refusing formal education by walking out of schools, youth have opened up questions about hegemonic, western modes of schooling (Biswas, 2023; Kvamme, 2019), questioning educational “hierarchies of knowledge, of what is considered worthy of knowing and learning” (Saeed, 2020, p. 5), and revealing the ways “formal schooling is a central part of the colonial-capitalist system that strikers are demanding be changed” (Verlie & Flynn, 2022, p. 6; see also Rappleye et al., 2024). This Special Issue welcomes papers that explore the interrogation of dominant ideologies in education by youth activism, as well as the ways education systems are implicated in broader colonial-capitalist, industrial, and militaristic systems.

Relatedly, climate activism, through divestment movements—and the stifling of these movements by higher education institutions—points to the prevalence of petro-power in education, where oil and gas interests infuse state decision-making and industry has a hand in educational governance, curricula, and pedagogy (Adkin, 2023; Eaton & Day, 2020; Hodkins, 2010; Tannock, 2020). In the face of such “exploitations and hypocrisies”, youth activism has begun to spur self-reflexive educational research about the ways that education systems are complicit in the climate crisis. In this vein, we invite papers that explore the interaction of youth activism and petro-power, and the increasing reliance of education on fossil capital as education is ushered into neoliberal systems.

Further, youth climate activism is often embedded in broader movements addressing human rights violations, war, capitalism, gender issues, or violence. For example, in campus protests and social media activism calling for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation in Gaza, we see young people linking the climate with peace, anticolonialism, and human rights (Hughes et al., 2023). Such intersectional movements raise questions about what education might learn from the ways climate issues interact with broader human rights movements, Indigenous land, water, and sky protection, anti-pipeline activism, feminist struggles, and efforts to protect old-growth forests. What do these sophisticated analyses of the intersections of social, political, ecological, climate, and epistemic justice mean for education?

While educational research has embraced the global youth climate strikes, particularly in the Global North, activism in other contexts has yet to be fully explored. Indeed, climate activism research seems to be largely following the coloniality of knowledge production (Mignolo, 2013). The activism of marginalized youth and young people in the Global South is often invisible and less attended to, particularly where activism is culturally unacceptable (Chang, 2020), criminalized (Ceric, 2020), underground, or perhaps unrecognized as activism, in a form of hermeneutical epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). What is the nature of youth climate activism in these contexts? How do youth activists in the Global South and other marginalized contexts resist and subvert colonial knowledge systems in their activism? What alternative modes of knowledge mobilization do they employ to effectively pursue their goals?

Young people utilize a multiplicity of contextual forms in their activism, including everyday activism, community- or school-based initiatives, divestment movements, youth organizing, advocacy, and creation of lowcarbon, waste-based, or activist art. Activism also involves providing for the needs of those disregarded through climate policy, as young people set up cooling centers during extreme heat events and provide for climate migrants. Young people’s actions speak to the forms of participation that are available to them, along with the ways they are included or dis-cluded from public life. This special issue welcomes contributions that explore these ranging forms of activism, including submissions written by and with youth in diverse contexts globally. We particularly welcome submissions by scholars and activists from the Global South, as well as those belonging to marginalized communities within the Global North.

While education scholarship draws hope and direction from many expressions of youth activism, we would be remiss to ignore the growth of eco-fascist and climate denialist activism (Campion, 2023; Szenes, 2021). The overwhelming focus on the youth climate strikes in the Global North has arguably positioned privileged young people as the spokespeople for the future, without attending to the fact that white supremacy, misogyny, and nationalism are finding expression in counter-movements that resist climate policies and energy transition, and that work towards bordering practices that refuse care to climate migrants. Understanding and responding to such movements is necessary if education systems are going to address youth resistance to climate change science (Long et al., 2022) and the underlying ideologies driving denialism and ecofascism. We invite papers that respond to this call.

The processing fee of CHF 1000 will be waived to ensure that all authors can share their work through this open access publication. Please indicate in your cover letter that your paper has been submitted to this Special Issue to ensure that fees are waived.

References

Adkin, L. E. (2023). Cracking foundations, contested futures: Post-secondary education in Alberta at the end of the holocene. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 0(0), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2023.2285652.

Biswas, T. (2023). Becoming good ancestors: A decolonial, childist approach to global intergenerational sustainability. Children & Society, 37(4), 1005–1020. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12722.

Biswas, T., and Mattheis, N. (2021). Strikingly educational: A child’s perspective on children’s civil disobedience for climate justice. Edu. Philos. Theory 54, 145–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1880390.

Campion, K. (2023). Defining ecofascism: Historical foundations and contemporary interpretations in the extreme right. Terrorism and political violence, 35(4), 926–944.

Ceric, I. (2020). Beyond contempt: Injunctions, land defense, and the criminalization of Indigenous resistance. South Atlantic Quarterly, 119(2), 353–369.

Chang, H.-C. (2022). Climate strike or not? Intersectionality of age and culture encountered by young climate activists in Taiwan. Childhood, 29(1), 7–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682221074869.

Eaton, E. M., & Day, N. A. (2020). Petro-pedagogy: Fossil fuel interests and the obstruction of climate justice in public education. Environmental Education Research, 26(4), 457–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1650164.

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. OUP Oxford.

Kvamme, O. A. (2019). School Strikes, Environmental Ethical Values, and Democracy. Studier i Pædagogisk Filosofi, 8(1), 6–27. https://doi.org/10.7146/spf.v8i1.117967.

Hodgkins, A. (2010). Manufacturing (il)literacy in Alberta’s classrooms: The case of an oil-dependent state. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 8(1), 263–298.

Hughes, S. S., Velednitsky, S., & Green, A. A. (2023). Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental injustice in the age of climate catastrophe. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(1), 495–513. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211069898.

Long, D., Henderson, J., & Meuwissen, K. (2022). What is climate change education in Trump Country? Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 39(1), 132–145.

Mignolo, W. D. (2013). Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking. Globalization and the Decolonial Option, 1–21.

Rahaman, H. (2021). Doctor Stockmann and Greta Thunberg: Some Implications of Intellectual Resistance, Eco-activism and Unschooling. Journal of Unschooling & Alternative Learning, 15(29), 36–60.

Rappleye, J., Komatsu, H., Silova, I. (2024). Re-thinking pedagogies for climate change activism: Cognitive, behaviorist, technological, or cultural? In Wyn, J., Cahill, H., Cuervo, H. (Eds.), Handbook of Children and Youth Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4451-96-3_127-1

Saeed, T. (2020). Reimagining education: Student movements and the possibility of a critical pedagogy and feminist praxis—UNESCO Digital Library. UNESCO, 1–13.

Szenes, E. (2021). Neo-Nazi environmentalism: The linguistic construction of ecofascism in a Nordic Resistance Movement manifesto. Journal for Deradicalization, (27), 146–192.

Tannock, S. (2020). The oil industry in our schools: From Petro Pete to science capital in the age of climate crisis. Environmental Education Research, 26(4), 474–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1724891.

Verlie, B., & Flynn, A. (2022). School strike for climate: A reckoning for education. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 38(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2022.5.

Dr. Carrie Karsgaard
Prof. Dr. Iveta Silova
Guest Editors

Victoria Desimoni
Guest Editor Assistant

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• youth climate activism
• divestment
• epistemic justice
• climate denial
• climate change education
• coloniality
• petro-power
• youth movements