Embodying ‘the Next Generation’: children’s everyday environmental activism in India and England

ABSTRACT

The symbolic evocation of ‘the next generation’ might be considered as valuable in buttressing calls for concerted public and political action on climate change, whilst assigning to children a unique identity and role in engendering sustainable transitions. Yet does an identity that is in essence equated with futurity stifle possibilities for children’s own actions in the present, and conflict with policy expectations that children can be ‘agents of (pro-environmental) change’? Drawing on multi-method doctoral research carried out with children (aged 11–14) and their families in varying socio-economic contexts in India and England, this paper considers the use and utility of generational identities in prompting environmental concern and explores how generationally framed imaginaries of childhood feature in children’s and family narratives of everyday environmental activism. Building on theoretical arguments of generational interdependence and ethics of care, the paper argues for greater recognition of children’s actual and potential contributions to engendering sustainable futures, whilst drawing attention to the ways in which children’s agency to act on environmental knowledge is supported by – and interdependent with – that of adult actors, not least parents.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• agency
• interdependence
• generation
• climate change

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Connectors research team (and editors of this special issue) for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper at a highly stimulating workshop, and for their and other workshop participants’ feedback on this paper.

The PhD research underpinning this paper was supervised by Professors Ann Phoenix and Janet Boddy, who were respectively principal investigators for the NOVELLA research node and the Family Lives and the Environment study in which the PhD was embedded. The PhD research owes much of its design and intellectual framing to how Ann and Janet designed and led these studies.

Data presented in this chapter were generated by the following researchers in England and India: Helen Austerberry, Janet Boddy, Hanan Hauari, Madhavi Latha, Natasha Shukla and Catherine Walker.

Finally and most importantly, thanks are due to the participants who so generously gave their time, energy and imagination to the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Dr Catherine Walker is a postdoctoral research associate in Human Geography at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research interests lie in children's and youth geographies, sustainability education and intergenerational approaches to theorising agency.

ORCID

Catherine Walker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3390-9272

Notes

1. Henceforth in this paper, I use the term ‘children’ to refer to those under the age of 18. This is in keeping with scholars of childhood, whose work has been influential to this paper and who have explored and theorised the ways in which children are generationally positioned vis-à-vis adults. In using the terms ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ in this paper, I refer to the generational positioning of ‘children’ as a societal group distinguished from ‘adults’, whilst acknowledging that many legally and societally constituted ‘children’ identify as ‘young people’.

2. As exemplified in an interview with Christiana Figueres, UN Chief Negotiator on Climate Change, published shortly before the 2015 Paris Summit (see Harvey, 2015).

3. The intention of the research team was to work with a smaller age range (11–12) by presenting the research to children from the same school year (year seven) when visiting schools. However, some schools in India had a high rate of older children in attendance in year seven. In one case, this resulted in us working with a 14-year-old boy who was in the same school year as the other children in the sample.

4. FLE was a constituent project of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods node NOVELLA (Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and Linked Approaches), which used and developed narrative approaches to analyse everyday family life (see Phoenix, 2011 and www.novella.ac.uk for details).

5. Labov’s (1972) systematic approach to the interpretation of narratives categorises talk into abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, and result. Occasionally speakers use a coda to ‘sign off’ the narrative and signify that its telling is complete.

Additional information

Funding

This PhD work and the study in which it was embedded were funded as part of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Phase III Node, Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and Linked Approaches (NOVELLA) [Grant Number RES-576-25-0053].