YoCLI: Young Climate Imaginaries
YoCLI is an exciting, interdisciplinary project funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation, where young people’s politics and young people’s literature collide in the study of climate change. Young people are reading novels about climate change, sharing creative visions, stories and imaginaries about the future of climate justice. This project brings together Dr Chloé Germaine and Dr Benjamin Bowman, who have expertise in youth literature and politics, with young people as co-researchers to analyse the role of creative fiction in the development of political subjectivities and attitudinal transformation.
Young people are reading together, sharing climate fiction and exploring visions for climate justice. YoCLI meetings are hosted by the Manchester Poetry Library and young people have been reading a range of different books together, provided free by the project, including Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline and Democracy of Species by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Publications:
Co-authored publications by the YoCLI team...
Coming soon!
By Benjamin Bowman and Chloé Germaine (2022)
In this article, we consider the climate strikes in the context of intergenerational narratives that de/limit young people’s political subjectivities and imaginaries concerning climate change. Considering the strikes alongside other youth-led responses to the crisis, we reconsider the question of young people’s climate change ‘literacy’ and posit that young people’s literacies are characteristically transformative. The climate change literacies of young people remain bound up in a complex, adult-centred discursive framework that limits young people in various ways, including positioning them as objects of care or otherwise objectivising their activism.
By Chloé Germaine Buckley and Benjamin Bowman (2021)
An essay on the climate strike movement for the British Council.
In this essay, we focus on the climate strike movement as an example of how young people are changing the world. We argue that this movement is more than a protest movement that demands environmental policies for a sustainable world. It is also, vitally, a global cultural exchange, in which young people and others exchange ideas, sentiments and solidarities. The climate strikes, we argue, are a movement in which young people and their allies share transformative visions for a new and better world.