Atmospheres of Youth Climate Justice Activism: Movements of Affective Political Participation

Recent analyses of young people’s climate justice activism have contributed nuanced understandings of the emotional experiences of young climate activists. This chapter extends and troubles this previous work to theorize affective modes of participation in climate action that stretch beyond the horizon of the liberal democratic subject. Bringing theoretical approaches from affect theory and the radical tradition of Black activist thought into conversation, we consider the more-than-human politics and perplexities of affect in youth climate justice activism. We ask: what other means of political participation might become sensible if we expand our focus beyond the representational categories of the liberal democratic subject? To do so, we follow movements of affective participation that flow across, throughout, behind, under, and beyond the school strikes. We consider how manners of affective participation agitate at the atmospheric edges of climate strike events, as expressions of an excessive movement of sociality (literally, a social movement) that never perfectly resolves into discrete individual subjects or State-forms of political thought. In so doing, we aim to deepen appreciation of the radical ways that young climate justice activists participate in politics: not simply through articulating and advocating for specific demands from the liberal democratic state but more pervasively through participating in dynamic affective relationalities that re-orient and re-organize social life.