“To Create Communities Where Care is Enjoyed and Valued in a Very High Regard”: Motivations, Approaches, and Impacts of Youth-Led Climate Collectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation explored youth engagement in climate collectives and how these groups affected participants’ lives, focusing on young people 13–18 years of age in the United States and Canada. Due to people’s concern for the escalating climate crisis, the study examined the following central research question: How do climate-oriented groups led by young people approach climate organizing, and how do the individuals who make up the groups perceive their participation in the movement? The research delved into the intricacies of youth-led climate work through 30 semi-structured individual interviews, weekly participant observation, and two group interviews. Participants were members of climate-oriented collectives, including Extinction Rebellion Youth, Sunrise Movement, Sustainabiliteens, and school-based clubs. Thematically analyzed results are presented in three categories: motivations, group processes, and impacts. Motivations ranged from family and upbringing to a compelling sense of urgency around the climate emergency and a heightened awareness of the global movement. Group processes participants discussed highlighted the diversity in advocacy approaches, emphasizing planning and communication, leadership styles, and outreach. The impacts encompassed nuanced emotions, navigating the challenges inherent in being a young person, perceptions of success, and effects on adolescent identity development. In the discussion section, I propose a frame of reference for comprehending these young people’s contemporary experiences of climate organizing, centering concepts of generativity and meaning-making. This research contributes valuable insights into the effects of climate organizing on young people, stressing the importance of amplifying youth voices in the climate movement and adults’ obligation to provide space for and support these collectives. It underscores the need for educational, civic, and policy frameworks to center young people’s perspectives while empowering youth participation in climate-related decision-making processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".