Victims or Vanguards?: The Discursive Construction of the Anthropocene Generation and its Implications for Climate Change Education

In this blogpost, which is based on a recent handbook chapter, Audrey Bryan and Yoko Mochizuki challenge the dominant discursive framings of children and youth who make up the Anthropocene generation. The blogpost is part of NORRAG’s blog series on Provocations for Education from Youth Climate Activism.

Generation Anthropocene

This post examines the ways in which dominant discursive framings of children and youth who make up the Anthropocene generation obscure nuanced understandings of their multifaceted engagement with the climate crisis and delimit the range of educational approaches and political responses available to them.

The Childhood Innocence/Vulnerability Frame

Children’s “unique vulnerability” to the impacts of climate change is a recurring narrative in academic, advocacy, and media-based reports about the climate crisis. Painting children as universally or uniquely vulnerable doesn’t reflect the more complex reality that global warming is a crisis of “differential vulnerabilities” (Dürbeck, 2019, p. 277), which affects people in different ways depending on, inter alia, their age, race, ethnicity, gender, geographical location, physical or mental health status.

Articulating their sense of “generational betrayal,” some youth activists subvert traditional adultist power relations and leverage youth as an ideological position from which to expose adults’ inertia (Malafaia, 2022, p. 430). While strategically significant, the representational logic of childhood innocence versus adult culpability has a number of problematic effects, not least in terms of advancing an overly simplistic portrayal of the complex realities of social movement organising. The trope of young heroes holding powerful villains to account can project all adults in a uniformly negative light, disregarding the history of social movements and the role adults play when children and young people act (Tannock, 2021).

The childhood innocence/adult responsibility dichotomy also masks children’s own contribution to carbon emissions. In consumer capitalist societies, children and young people contribute, albeit indirectly and unevenly, to climate-related harms via “ordinary harms” (Agnew, 2020)—norms, practices, and behaviours that make up the carbon-heavy lifestyles that are collectively detrimental to the planet and its inhabitants.

The Exceptionalism/Heroism Frame

The youth climate activist as a hero frame is another depiction, which places the burden of responsibility for climate action exclusively onto young people. Moreover, some young people’s ecological activism is problematically informed by a saviouristic logic, which fails to recognise those identified as climate “victims” as possessing their own knowledge, wisdom, and agency to respond to the climate crisis (Karsgaard & Davidson, 2023).

The Mental Health/Eco-anxiety Frame

Children are often portrayed as especially vulnerable to climate anxiety, with some commentators going so far as to suggest that children may be “uniquely predisposed” to these emotional states (Crandon et al., 2022, p. 223). This ignores the mental health impacts of climate change on diverse social categories including older and marginalised populations, women, and those with pre-existing physical and mental health challenges (Banwell & Eggert, 2024). While highlighting the “problem” of eco-anxiety among children and youth, identifying children as uniquely predisposed to climate anxiety can undermine collective climate action by underestimating the levels of distress that adults may be feeling (Timmons et al., 2022), and the underreporting or under-exploration of eco-anxiety levels among adults (Pihkala, 2024).

The Agency/Activism Frame

The aforementioned frames complexly intersect with a child and youth agency/activism frame, which positions youth in particular as the vanguard of the climate movement and “catalysts of political change” (Malafaia, 2022, p. 422). Whereas those who engage in non-threatening activities are often celebrated as change agents, those who engage in more collective acts of “principled disobedience” risk being labelled as extremists and arrested (Lesko et al., 2024).

Another problematic aspect of the agency/activism frame is its tendency to focus on youth-led climate activism in the global North and in wealthy and White communities. This elevation of white activists has the effect of obscuring the pioneering commitment to climate activism and justice on the part of Black, Indigenous, and other young people of colour who represent the majority of youth climate activists globally (Verlie & Flynn, 2022).

Moving beyond “Business-as-Usual (but Greener) Politics”

The hopeful, resilient, post-political ideal learning subject that emerges from the discursive representation outlined above obscures more uncomfortable realities about some children and youths’ implication in the ecological crisis; occludes more nuanced and expansive encounters with responsibility and vulnerability; and bolsters a misguided pedagogical preoccupation with fostering “hope,” “optimism,” and “resilience,” which reinscribe “business as usual (but greener)” (BAU-G) politics (Baskin, 2019) rather than the system change that is so desperately required (Stein, 2024).

The mental health/eco-anxiety frame–with its emphasis on cultivating “capacities” for “hope,” “optimism,” “resilience,” and “efficacy” as an antidote to feelings of hopelessness and despair–runs the risk of pathologizing those who are incapable of becoming more hopeful and resilient. The eco-anxiety frame overlaps with the agency/activism frame to inform pedagogical responses preoccupied with the cultivation of human-centric skills, pro-environmental behaviour, and individualised responsibility. This downplays justice-driven approaches, which account for the unevenness of the distribution of climate-related harms, risks, and accountability and that foreground multispecies rather than anthropocentric notions of justice.  Failure to foreground justice-driven perspectives is compounded by the childhood innocence/adult responsibility frame, a politically polarising discourse that thwarts deeper understandings of the dynamics of intergenerational movement-building and diminishes opportunities for intergenerational solidarity and mutual learning between older and younger generations.

Universalising narratives which position all children as equally vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis further undermines meaningful pedagogical opportunities for children and young people to develop nuanced and expansive understandings of responsibility and vulnerability accounting for the unevenness of the distribution of climate-related culpability, harms, and risks (Bryan, 2022). For example, sustained opportunities for dialogue with children and young people who live in carbon-intensive societies about their complex positioning as “implicated subjects” in the climate emergency (Rothberg, 2019) are critical if the wider cultural and political-economic ideologies and systems fuelling the climate crisis are to be replaced with more eco-centric and justice-oriented alternatives.

Greater attention to how children and youth of the Anthropocene are discursively produced by mainstream and alternative media, academics, politicians, policymakers, and educationalists–and within activist communities themselves–is necessary if moving beyond “business-as-usual (but greener) politics” is to become a reality.

The Authors

Audrey Bryan is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Human Development at Dublin City University’s Institute of Education.  She holds a PhD in comparative and international education (with an academic specialisation in sociology) from Columbia University. She has published widely in the fields of global citizenship education and climate change education, from a critical perspective. Her scholarship addresses the question of how to teach difficult (ecological) knowledge to learners based in emissions-intensive societies and the associated psycho-affective dimensions of teaching and learning.  She is Section Editor (with Yoko Mochizuki) of the Climate Section of the Springer Handbook of Children and Youth Studies (2024).

Yoko Mochizuki is an associate member of the EDA (Éducation, Discours, Apprentissages) laboratory, an interdisciplinary research unit of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Université Paris Cité (formerly Université Paris Descartes). She holds a PhD in comparative and international education, with distinction, from Columbia University. Previously, she was Head of Policy at UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in New Delhi. Before that, she served as a programme specialist for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Climate Change at UNESCO Paris and an ESD specialist at the United Nations University.