Beware of generationalism:the structural (in)visibility of BIPOC youths in global climate summits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On December 11, 2019, a group of Fridays for Future activists performed a sit-in on the stage of an event on "the climate emergency" at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid, also known as COP25.The sit-in was unsanctioned, namely it was not pre-approved by UN Security, but was nonetheless received with great excitement by delegates: "this young generation holds great promise," a fellow researcher confided as we exited the room.The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Instagram account embraced it as part of their event, posting a story that featured the protesters and the tagline "Special #COP25 event on the #climateemergency."Later that day, an intergenerational group of 200 or so -which primarily included Indigenous groups and other people of color -held another unsanctioned protest.They were not received with enthusiasm but with disapproval: they were forcibly removed from the premises and threatened with being blacklisted from this and future COPs.All in all, the young people that participated in the afternoon protest received much harsher treatment.The afternoon protesters are expelled from the conference area.Photo credit: Laura Bullon-Cassis.I conducted two years of participant observation of assemblies, meetings, protests, and plenaries, inside and around UN climate summits in 2019 and 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic that put in-person summitry on pause.This was complemented with 56 semi-structured interviews that sought to capture the comparatively different experiences of the young people who foreground their age and engage as "youth" in UN summits with those of young people who choose other categories of representation such as "Indigenous Peoples."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".