Victims or Vanguards? The Discursive Construction of the Anthropocene Generation and Climate Change Education’s Hopeful, Resilient, Post-Political Subject

Education is increasingly recognized as an essential part of the solution to the climate crisis. Yet the complex relationship between climate change education (CCE) and how children and young people of the Anthropocene are discursively constituted remains under-theorized. This chapter critically explores the discursive construction of children and youth who make up the Anthropocene generation, with particular reference to overlapping representative framings of this generation in terms of their innocence/vulnerability, their exceptionalism/heroism, their mental health/eco-anxiety, and their agency/activism. We highlight what is invisibilized, obscured, or neglected within these interwoven frames and discuss how they undercut meaningful social and educational responses to the climate crisis. Central to our analysis is the ideal learning subject that emerges from the discursive construction of the Anthropocene generation. This hopeful, resilient, post-political figure 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 rather than the system change that is so desperately required.