Politicization in Practice: Learning the Politics of Racialization, Patriarchy, and Settler Colonialism in the Youth Climate Movement

As anti-pipeline struggles have become a central focus of the North American environmental movement, the Whiteness, masculinity, and settler-coloniality of the mainstream movement has come under more scrutiny than ever. Though the mainstream environmental movement has long been acknowledged as a White default space, committed to strategies and tactics rooted in settler-colonial logics, and managed by White men at the highest levels, there is a broad conversation emerging right now arguing that the movement needs to unsettle those norms, and urgently. This study looks at one climate campaign as a case study with the potential to reveal both how mainstream environmental spaces become default spaces of Whiteness, masculinity, and settler-coloniality, as well as how these activist groups can become politicized, resisting social relations of dominance and centring reconciliation in their approach to climate justice. Using sociocultural theory as the lens for theorizing learning within the climate movement, this dissertation brings learning within social movements into focus, examining cognition, participation, ways of knowing and being, and identity development across a two-year activist campaign. This dissertation examines Fossil Free UofT, the University of Toronto campaign for fossil fuel divestment. I ask how participants learned to understand and disrupt social relations of racialization, settler colonialism, and patriarchy. I examine what participants in the campaign learned and how they mobilized their learning collectively to reproduce and resist racialized, gendered, and colonial power relations. I also question how sociocultural theories of learning enable theorizations of politicization, as well as how they can be strengthened through sustained attention to the ways that social relations shape opportunities to learn in movements. This dissertation contributes to an emergent field in the learning sciences, where social movements and community organizations are increasingly analyzed for their ability to foment unique learning opportunities. I theorize politicization within this context, providing a framework for sociocultural learning theorists to bring together disparate conversations about learning, civic engagement, sociopolitical development, and critical social analysis.

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