Enacting Everyday Environmental Citizenship: Youthful Interpretations of Belonging and Empowerment

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that young people’s critical agency related to consumerism and climate change, whether individually or collectively performed, is derived from lived experiences through which young people perform their interpretive agency. Building on the performative understanding of citizenship and digital ethnographic data on early youth with diverse social positioning from different regions, I intend to show how young people in Turkey, where the authoritarian regime restrains their civic engagements immensely, practice their interpretive agency and create youthful ways to enact their environmental subjectivities. I further analyze the intersubjective, spatial and, affective character of everyday environmental practices of young people in Turkey, reflecting their ways of belonging and empowerment that translate into shared (youthful) environmental values.