Description
The youth are in the centre stage of the global debate on climate change. Governments and media either brand today’s young to be the main victims of the looming climate catastrophe, or herald them to be the saviours of the planet. With all the limelight and hype, the youth are getting overwhelmed by climate anxiety (Climate Psychology Alliance, online; Hickman, 2019; Institute of Global Health Innovation, online; Good Grief Network, on line; Grantham Institute, on line). Both high expectations and doomsday scenarios put the pressure on a new generation, affect its wellbeing and shape patterns of engagement with the community – now and in the future. Our paper will identify leading narratives on climate change among the youth and ask: How do narratives of anxiety, anger and helplessness compare vs. narratives of being resilient, empowered and capable in the face of the climate crisis?
Informed by the strategic narrative theory (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle, 2013) and its tri-partite model of formulation-projection-reception, our paper explores the narratives on climate change in general, and climate anxiety specifically. Focusing on the role of anxiety in the narrative life cycle – an overlooked conceptual dimension in the theorisation of strategic narratives -- we identify and compare narratives of reception on systemic, identity and issue-specific levels (Miskimmon et al., 2013). In particular, we ask how anxiety either pre-mediates or influences the reception of strategic narratives among youth. The application of the theory to the climate change issue-area is novel. Further, strategic narrative research has yet to incorporate how affective charge and anxiety interact with the reception of strategic narratives. Our innovation is also in terms of methods. We analyse and compare narratives generated by the youth in the course of the representative general public survey (conducted in the US in 2018) vis-à-vis narratives tracked in the course of the focus group with educated youth (post-graduate students) using Q Sort method (conducted in New Zealand in 2018). The paper contributes by discussing advantages and limitations of the two methods in the strategic narrative research.
