Learning With Student Climate Strikers' Humour: Toward Critical Affective Climate Justice Literacies

• In Event: Laugh, and the World Laughs With You? The Comedic Turn in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

This paper considers the potential of humour in contemporary student-led climate justice activism to inform the formation of critical affective climate justice literacy pedagogies in environmental education. A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (also known as Fridays for Futures and Youth Strike for Climate) has been young people’s use of humour on cardboard signs, digital memes, and social media posts, which have frequently mobilised humour to emotionally stir and politically engage others. While students’ humour has been at times misinterpreted and its political force trivialised (Bowman, 2019; Mayes & Hartup, 2021), these texts have simultaneously satirised capitalist colonialist extractivist logics and affirmed that “another world is possible” (Johnson, 2019, para. 1). This paper intersects with previous analyses of the potential of humour in social movement studies (Bore et al., 2018; Fominaya, 2007) and climate change communication (Boykoff & Osnes, 2019; Kaltenbacher & Drews, 2020) and recent calls from environmental education scholars to pay greater attention to the potency of emotion for climate justice education (e.g., Buckland et al, 2020; Mayes & Holdsworth, 2020). I extend these insights with work from language arts scholars who discuss the pedagogical potential of critical affective literacy: that is, critical engagement with how readers develop emotional relationships with texts, and how readers’ emotional responses are forms of cultural politics (Anwaruddin, 2016; Bondy & Johnson, 2020). For this paper, I conducted a close analysis of three photographs of cardboard signs that were created by students for the November 2018 Australian School Strikes for Climate, and were identified during a corpus analysis of 500 articles from 29 newspapers from Australian national, state, regional, and rural newspapers as well as ABC News and The Guardian Australia. The three signs all responded to a statement made by conservative Australian Prime Minister that there should be “more learning and less activism in schools.” I analysed how humour works in these signs, drawing on conceptual resources from feminist politics of emotion (Ahmed, 2004; Anwaruddin, 2016) and consider how the smiles stirred by these signs might be taken up in classrooms to spark emotional engagement (McDermott & Lenters, 2021), critical conversations about the relationship between learning and activism and facts and feelings (Brennan et al., 2021), exploration of power relations and subversions (cf. Dodds & Kirby, 2013; Jones & McGloin, 2016), and the political actions necessary in polarised political and media ecologies (Boler & Davis, 2018). I consider how such collective analyses of humour have the potential to foster social awareness and critical consciousness (cf. Mora et al., 2015; Mayo 2010; Rossing, 2016), broaden the range of emotions associated with the climate crisis and climate activism (Bowman, 2019; Jones & Davison, 2020), and “open up spaces in which habitual responses no longer make sense and more sophisticated types of thinking, listening and speaking are called for” (Gordon & Mayo, 2014, p. 118).

Author

• Eve Mayes