Educating Utopia in the School Strike for Climate Crisis Movement - Immersive Video Essay
Channel: Heather McKnight
Date: 2021-04-21

Made for the Taking Care in the Climate Crisis Conference 2021 by Dr Heather McKnight - This is designed to be an immersive experience and is best listened to with headphones

The school strike movement began August 2018 when 15 year old Greta Thunberg held a solo protest outside the Swedish parliament. By February 2019, the UK-wide climate change strike saw thousands of schoolchildren and young people walk out of classes, angry at the failure of politicians to make progress on the escalating ecological crisis. These protests have continued over lockdown in varying digital, creative and collaborative forms.

This essay uses critical utopian theory to interrogate the discourses of these school strikes.  It contends that the movements go beyond presenting a vision of an inescapable future, or a simplistic request for adults to listen to science, as suggested by some critics. Instead, their vision is constructive of a better world as they challenge the failures of politicians and the adult public more generally. Young participants and organisers demand to play an active role in policy making when it comes to climate crisis, making specific claims and requests around democratic reform. Using activist pedagogies the school strike movement increasingly centres the interconnection between racism, colonialism and the climate crisis.

The school strike movement is constructed of a critical utopian discourse expressed through complex temporalities, which define the role of resistance as anticipation. Arguably the movement has, even during the pandemic, proven to be self-reflexive and grounded in a broader discourse on politics, oppression, and futurity. The anxiety in the student strike movement creates a non-violent but militant optimism, and the narratives of cathedral thinking are demonstrative of an open-ended utopian process that as activists and academics we have much to learn from.

#climatecrisis #gretathunberg