Uncovering Emotion in Youth Digital Civic Participation Around Climate Change: Entanglements of Fear, Despair, and Anger in Civic Practice

Abstract

Attention to emotion could offer insight into supporting the science-informed civic participation of young people. We drew on sociocultural views of emotion, civic participation, and science literacies to examine digital civic media about climate change produced by youth during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, investigating intersections of emotional, civic, and scientific practices of making meaning. Using mixed-methods, we analyzed 82 media pieces created by youth across the US. With an analytic framework informed by prior research and adapted to meet our data, we found two common patterns that emerged in over half of the data set: (1) fear and/or despair around the impacts of climate change and (2) anger over inaction around mitigating climate change. Additionally, we found that the fear/despair pattern was associated with youth engagement in civic empathy and the anger pattern was associated with youth practices of critique. We also identified less common and less distinct patterns, including positive emotion around actions, guilt around causes, and generalized worry across youth civic authors. We use these findings to suggest that emotion is entangled in youth civic participation around climate change, and that such participation can be afforded and constrained by emotion. We offer implications for teaching and use our findings to call attention to the need for science education that attends to the emotional nature of youth social practices within and beyond science-related civic issues.