Abstract
In recent years, two unrelated developments have opened up new opportunities for examining how young people relate to climate change and participate in climate politics. First, there is a fast-growing literature in sociology and youth studies concerned with the roles of imagined futures in social action. Second, and more recent, is an explosion of youth-based climate activism, particularly the Fridays For Future movement. In this paper, I draw from in-depth interviews with participants in the Fridays For Future protests in London in Spring 2019, arguing that in this case of youth mobilization, protesters relied on shared, overarching narratives about the future of climate change, albeit ones that allow room for some divergence in opinion. In particular, I examine how regular involvement in the movement influenced participants’ imagined futures. Drawing from studies of similar issues by Kleres and Wettergren (2017) and Threadgold (2012), and from the phenomenological concept of “orientation” (Ahmed, 2005; Carabelli and Lyon, 2016), I argue that regular and repeated participation in climate activism engenders optimism among youth. This opens new ways of thinking about the relationship between political action and young people’s anticipations of climate change, with implications for scholarship of imagined futures, youth politics and climate politics.
Highlights
In recent years, two unrelated developments have opened up new opportunities for examining how young people relate to climate change and participate in climate politics
Using the extended case method, I draw from in-depth interviews I conducted with ten young people who participated in the Fridays For Future climate strikes in 2019 to examine how they imagined the future of climate change and how this played into their political activism
Fridays For Future provides new opportunities for examining how young people think about the future of climate change, and how they respond to these imagined futures politically
Summary
“You've run out of excuses and we're running out of time. We’ve come here to let you know that change is coming whether you like it or not” (Thunberg, 2019, p. 16). Anticipations of the future have featured prominently in environmentalist discourse (White, 2017) and in the recent explosion of youth climate activism, including the aptly named Fridays For Future movement For this reason, Fridays For Future provides new opportunities for examining how young people think about the future of climate change, and how they respond to these imagined futures politically. Bringing the theoretical accounts mentioned above and the results of in-depth interviews with youth protesters in conversation with literature from social movement theory, phenomenological sociology and youth studies, I argue that participants in the movement relied on shared narratives about the future, but that each individual’s relative optimism or pessimism diverged based on how regularly they participated in climate action
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