Search

The climate movement has mobilised unprecedented numbers of people to address the issue of climate change. Notably, this movement has seen significant participation from young people who, as they will bear the brunt of the climate crisis in the coming decades, have voiced the urgency of the situation. By representing the future, these young climate activists have made the effects of the climate crisis tangible and personal. Drawing on feminist and constructivist representation theory, this paper examines the role of representative claims about future generations by young people in global environmental and climate politics. In their interactions with fora such as UNFCCC meetings , young people often find themselves marginalised. Despite this relative powerlessness, I argue that through their descriptive claims to represent future generations, they have appropriated and reshaped the concept of intergenerational justice. This paper details the intricate interplay between marginalisation and representation experienced by youth-led environmental groups. It contributes to the conceptualisation of political representation as a discursive practice of future-making by marginalised actors in the context of global climate politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) process, different futures are contested, negotiated and become embedded in the Anthropocene. Those futures travel from one city to another, from businesses to local schools, or from protest events to the international negotiation fora of the United Nation (UN). By investigating the translation practices of Anthropocene futures from the global context of the UN into the local context of the city of Baltimore (United States), this paper traces how local actors engage with global norms and how they gain or lose agency in this process. Putting forward imaginaries of past, present and futures are practices of norm translation and appropriation that clearly change the once envisioned global future narratives. The paper brings together the Anthropocene scholarship with the International Relations-literature on translation. I suggest a new conceptual approach of translation that includes notions of ruptures, discontinuities and present pasts as main factors in translation processes. I apply this new framework to the case of SDG localization in Baltimore. In doing so, I analyse three major reports and 10 qualitative interviews that I conducted with local actors from the university, the city administration as well as different civil society actors in 2018. Here, I will discuss the different temporal notions, more specifically the way futures and pasts intersect in non-linear processes of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Intergenerational justice; Youth; Sustainability; Future EN Intergenerational justice Youth Sustainability Future 1 11 11 04/27/22 20220419 NES 220419 Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-022-00194-7. Intergenerational justice is mainly defined as a form of distributive justice, where present generations hold an obligation towards future generations "not to pursue policies that create benefits for themselves but impose costs on those who will live in the future" [[25]]. Politicizing intergenerational justice To politicize intergenerational justice, youth activists have adopted the more radical terms (and associated terminology) of "environmental justice" and "climate justice" and translated them into a new version of intergenerational justice. [Extracted from the article]

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) process aimed to be more inclusive, transparent, and participatory than prior United Nations processes. This article traces the practices of representation that were performed by civil society actors during the SDG process. In doing so, we advance a performative approach in which the very process of making representation is examined. Its aim is to conceptualize and study representation as an aesthetic and political practice. This leads to the two central research questions of this article: How do civil society organizations in global environmental politics make representative claims by picturing their envisioned future? How are future representations (that is, the representation of futures or future beings) related to actor positions during the SDG process? Special emphasis is given to representations of "the future" as an ever-present frame of reference in environmental politics. Based on a systematic content analysis of the statements of two Major Groups—Children, and Youth and Farmers—we discuss the variety of future representations between the Major Groups and how especially more radical future representations are connected to rather precarious actor positions in representative claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women’s movements in Western Europe are not dead, but they have altered their strategies in ways that require adaptation of investigative repertoires. Recent research highlights women’s movements’ pathways into institutions as well as the transnationalisation of activism. This article focuses on the shifting public communication repertoire associated with these developments. Communication and movement outreach across Europe are increasingly constituted online. The authors investigate the degree to which women’s networks in Germany and the UK mobilise constituencies via online means. Utilising network mapping tools as well as original data from women’s NGOs, they analyse the density and distribution of relationships in German and UK networks, as well as their interactive communication repertoires as indicators of their capacity to engage constituents. The findings show that information-focused means of communication are more prevalent than interactive mobilisation tools. Women’s NGOs in the UK utilise more public engagement features than those in Germany. The authors relate these findings to second-, third- and fourth-wave feminisms, focusing on their distinct mobilisation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene thesis makes it necessary for the social sciences to engage with temporality in novel ways. The Anthropocene highlights interconnections between 'natural' and 'social' non-linear temporal processes. However, accounts of humanity's Anthropocene history often reproduce linear, progressive narratives of human development. This forecloses the possibilities that thinking with non-linear temporalities would offer to the political sciences. Engaging with the temporal complexity of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture that highlights non-linearity allows to acknowledge more fully the affective impact of living on a disrupted planet. As a discourse about temporal rupture, the Anthropocene is a stocktaking of the already vast insecurities and losses brought about by exploitative relationships with earth and its inhabitants. In this form, the Anthropocene thesis highlights how material and social legacies of inequality and exploitation shape our present and delimit our imaginaries of the future. By including a reckoning of violent pasts into future practices, a productive politics of mourning could take shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]