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Young people all over the world are responding to the climate crisis. Many are engaging with political institutions and processes. Others are leading protests. Their action is diverse, imaginative, and creative. Young people involved in the ‘Fridays for the Future’ school strikes, for example, are not only making policy demands; they are communicating their ideas about possible future worlds. Bringing the study of youth politics together with the study of youth literature, Dr Benjamin Bowman and Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University are investigating how young people’s politics about the climate crisis is bound up with literature, storytelling and young people’s own creative self-expression.
Imagination and Activism: Exploring Youth Literature and Youth Politics of the Climate Crisis
Funded by Manchester Metropolitan University and The Political Studies Association, the project – Young Climate Imaginaries – examines the ways in which young people make sense of climate change through literature and politics. The global climate strike movement demonstrates that young people’s creative self-expression is indivisible from their politics, but this is not always recognised. The study uses fiction reading and writing groups to explore young people’s politics of climate change and their expressive and creative narratives at the same time. The main contention is that imaginative fiction, the reading and writing thereof, is a resource through which young people can construct, explore and negotiate their political subjectivities.
The project is interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and ideas from the study of politics, youth literature and creative writing. Adult-authored narratives about young people and climate change that circulate in the media, political institutions and fiction tend to delimit young people’s role in shaping the future, placing constraints on their imaginaries. To counteract these processes, the project uses participatory methods to enable young people as co-researchers, developing a framework for exploring young climate imaginaries and young visions of the future.
The project will be recruiting participants through February and March 2021. The research is supported by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University and by the Political Studies Association. The pilot will run for twelve months and hopes to reach a diverse group of young people with whom to explore these ideas.
For more information contact: C.Germaine.Buckley@mmu.ac.uk or B.Bowman@mmu.ac.uk.
Thursday, 4th February 2021