"The Only Environmental Justice Is Indigenous Land Repatriation": Killjoy Pedagogies and Unsettling Youth Climate Activism

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Collective Action to Unsettle and Dismantle Educational Inequities

Abstract

This conceptual paper presents an analysis of the contradictions that emerge within contemporary youth climate activism. As part of a larger ethnographic project with Latinx and Indigenous youth organizers in San Francisco, I examine how they unsettle the harmonious and comfortable affective registers that emerge from youth climate justice activism. Drawing from La Paperson’s (2017) notion of “ghetto land pedagogies”, I analyze how one of my youth interlocutors injected a confrontational and decolonial perspective into the ostensibly unifying and progressive spirit of a large youth led climate justice March in San Francisco. This moment crystallizes how BIPOC youth engage in ideological struggle against the limits of larger social justice movements.

Author

• Miguel N. Abad, University of California - Los Angeles