Voices of a generation

In this article, we look at the most recent high tide of the climate crisis attention from the perspective of the school strikers’ movement. It is based on interviews with 31 young climate activists from 23 countries around the world, made possible by the work of several colleagues in MediaClimate –network (mediaclimate.net), a group of researchers who have studied global climate media coverage/debates since 2008. The interviews followed a semi-structured guideline, prompting respondents to discuss how their activism started, their role in the local movement, the nature of movement organization and their relations to other institutions and actors (NGOs, media, politicians). This diverse sample of dialogues with activists in a wide variety of global political and cultural contexts cultures, languages and local conditions collectively produced a vast discursive material. In our analysis, we first look at the specific way science and interaction with scientists is part of the youths’ action horizon, combining this to the ways in which they relate their life experiences to climate science. Second, we will situate this specific science-activism analysis to a brief overview of the nature (or inner logic) of the school movement and the identity of the activists. Through these two empirical excursions, we harvest some lessons about communicating climate science suggested by the youth movement.