Exploring the lived experiences of youth in the context of climate change: A geo-social and performative approach to study environmental citizenship

This paper explores the lived experiences of youth in the context of climate change, using a geo-social and performative approach to youth citizenship. It argues that relational orientation in the study of childhood and youth allows for genuine interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration with other relational disciplines (e.g., geography, anthropology) and challenges essentialist ontologies. Drawing on two relational disciplinary perspectives that acknowledge youth's political agency (i.e., children's geographies studying children's political agency and citizenship studies theorising on children's lived citizenship), this paper critiques the adult-led conceptualisations of green values and environmental ideologies. It proposes new methodological agendas to study youth environmental citizenship that trace the lived worlds of early youth and explore their critical environmental agency. The paper presents two complementary bottom-up approaches to studying youth critical agency in the everyday environmental context, along with the partial data and results of a pilot study conducted through them. Employing these strategies in a digital ethnography, data is collected through online mapping activities, online in-depth interviews, and essay writing. The paper distinguishes between developing (socialisation and subject formation) and performing (enaction) critical environmental agency: The former aims to reveal youth's environmental socialisation by analysing the politico-spatial dimensions of their social life comprising friends, family, school, and other social circles. The latter focuses on the active roles and decision-making that young people perform individually or collectively concerning consumerism and the environment. The paper further argues that critical studies focusing on the embodied and relational everyday experiences of young people enable studying citizenship across spaces and places, revealing different relational and spatial patterns by adopting critical geographical perspectives.