Ecologies of learning for climate transformations in the lives of Finnish, Senegalese, and Brazilian young people

Application summary

Young people have been front-runners in raising awareness about the magnitude of the climate crisis and the profound transformations it requires in societies. It is known that in the global context, young people's perspectives on the impacts, effects, and possible solutions of the climate crisis vary according to their socio-cultural settings. For example, in Finland, Senegal and Brazil youth’s everyday lives and contexts of learning beyond formal education are shaped by diverse cultural, religious and Indigenous knowledge systems. However, little is known about how young people learn to adapt to and to mitigate climate transformations while navigating among co-existent, colliding and merging epistemologies. We claim that to further advance scientific and political discussions and actions for climate justice, it is necessary to dismantle Euro-centric universalizing ideas about climate transformations. To this end, this four-years transdisciplinary research project focuses on young people’s (15-24 years) learning around the climate crisis in Dakar (Senegal), Fortaleza (Brazil), and Espoo and Lempäälä (Finland). The project draws from learning sciences and decolonial cultural studies. The research data will be produced in a long-term collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews, audiovisual recordings and collaborative data production and analysis with young co-researchers. Young people’s learning around climate transformations is analyzed through ‘learning ecologies’, which in the learning sciences refers to a set of formal and informal contexts in and across which people learn. We expand this approach with decolonial ideas about epistemic pluriversality: addressing the diverse epistemologies present in young people’s everyday lives and diverse contexts of learning. The results will be disseminated through conferences, journal articles and a scientific book, and by active communication with non-academic audiences.