Youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research - commentary to Bowman

IF 1.3 Q2 GEOGRAPHY
B. Wood
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引用次数: 10

Abstract

In this commentary I respond to Benjamin Bowman’s Fennia paper by extending upon his central thesis that argues that the prevailing methodological tools and framings used to research youth political participation perpetuate unhelpful and inadequate dichotomies about youth. Advancing upon this, I suggest that the youth climate strikes in 2019 highlight three prevalent discourses in youth research relating to climate change: (i) the tendency to view youth as isolated individuals, neglecting the role of adults and communities; (ii) the tendency to focus on individual behavioural change rather than recognise the need for systemic and societal responses to climate change, and (iii) the tendency to overlook structural characteristics of youth such as race, gender and social class. The resulting discourses of youth autonomy, individualism and homogeneity lead to a distorted picture of young activists and perpetuate harmful narratives which lead to stigma, despair and cynicism. The paper concludes by advocating for greater care in the research methodologies and critical frameworks we use to report on youth at public events, such as climate strikes, in order to allow for the complexity of the young political agent, the ambiguity of some of their actions and for opportunities that enable young people themselves to articulate their own participation.
青年领导的气候罢工:青年研究的新机遇和持久挑战-鲍曼评论
在这篇评论中,我对本杰明·鲍曼(Benjamin Bowman)在芬兰发表的论文进行了回应,扩展了他的中心论点,即用于研究青年政治参与的主流方法工具和框架使关于青年的无益和不充分的二分法永久化。在此基础上,我建议2019年的青年气候罢工突出了与气候变化有关的青年研究中的三种普遍话语:(I)倾向于将青年视为孤立的个体,忽视成年人和社区的作用;(ii)倾向于关注个人行为改变,而不是认识到需要对气候变化作出系统和社会反应;(iii)倾向于忽视青年的结构性特征,如种族、性别和社会阶层。由此产生的关于青年自治、个人主义和同质化的言论导致了对青年积极分子的歪曲,并使有害的叙述永久化,从而导致耻辱、绝望和玩世不恭。最后,本文主张在研究方法和关键框架方面更加谨慎,以便我们在报告气候罢工等公共事件中使用青年,以便考虑到青年政治代理人的复杂性,他们的一些行动的模糊性,以及使年轻人自己能够表达自己参与的机会。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
2.70
自引率
0.00%
发文量
15
审稿时长
16 weeks
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