Description
In 2019, the international environmental movement “Fridays for Future” emerged and successfully used weekly school strikes as a tool to draw politicians’ attention to the climate crisis and demand action from them in response to rapid global warming. The singularity of this progressive social movement lied in the fact that it was driven mainly by school students, not by university students. Although 14–19-year-olds made up the biggest age group in these weekly school protests for climate across Europe, it was striking to witness how little questions of youth emancipation were tied in with questions of climate justice. In fact, Germany’s leading climate activist Luisa Neubauer once said that discussing young people’s political status as part of greater climate justice would be a diversionary tactic from transformative climate politics. This contribution challenges that notion and holds that one reason why the movement lost traction was its failure to find a common language for the structural injustice that young people encounter as political beings. My novel concept of political adultism aims to provide a framework for youth and environmental movements around the world to articulate the epistemic injustice they are experiencing. Political adultism is the socially-accepted interpersonal, structural, and institutional discrimination of young and younger people in politics and on political matters. In this piece, I will lay out how Miranda Fricker’s concepts of hermeneutical and testimonial injustice serve as the basis for establishing political adultism as a unique form of structural epistemic injustice towards young people in politics.
