Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue “Politics of Disruption: Youth Climate Activisms and Education”

1. Introduction

Why write about youth climate activism in 2026? Years have passed since Fridays for Future saw millions of young people in cities all over the planet, especially in Europe and North America, strike for the climate. In 2019, young people walked out of schools in droves to hold their political leaders to account for inaction on emissions reductions. They spurred conversations on climate justice at national and international levels, with ripple effects on climate education policy, curriculum, and pedagogy. School strikers opened up questions about hegemonic, Western modes of schooling (Biswas, 2023; Kvamme, 2019), questioning educational “hierarchies of knowledge, of what is considered worthy of knowing and learning” (Saeed, 2020, p. 5) and revealing the ways “formal schooling is a central part of the colonial-capitalist system that strikers are demanding be changed” (Verlie & Flynn, 2022, p. 6; see also Rappleye et al., 2024). At the same time, tensions within these movements, such as the disproportionate attention to white youth activists, along with the challenges in creating intersectional climate responses, deepened discussions about climate justice and the need for climate movements to address colonialism and other power imbalances related to race, ability, and gender. These strikes were a force.

Now, however, the streets feel relatively empty of youth climate activists. Disinformation and political polarization are reducing climate concern in some countries and making climate action and education increasingly difficult or even dangerous. The growth of eco-fascist and climate denialist activism (Campion, 2023; Szenes, 2021) reveals how white supremacy, misogyny, and nationalism find expression in counter-movements that resist climate policies and energy transition, and that work toward bordering practices that refuse care to climate migrants. Big oil has infused climate talks such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP) meetings, leaving youth disillusioned with decision-makers. Petro-power remains influential in education, where oil and gas interests infuse state decision-making and industry has a hand in educational governance, curricula, and pedagogy (Adkin, 2024; Eaton & Day, 2020; Hodgkins, 2010; Karsgaard & Shultz, 2025; Tannock, 2020). Global action on emissions reductions has been poor, and wealthy states persistently resist climate reparations (loss and damage) paid to those most affected by climate change, abandoning many young people to devastating effects. Wildfires and extreme weather events lead to evacuations and school closures, shifts in agricultural zones affect subsistence livelihoods and the cost of living, and all climate impacts continue to disproportionately impact working class, racialized, Indigenous, and other marginalized youth. Many young people’s lived realities remain profoundly shaped by climate change.

In this period of relative public silence on climate change, this Special Issue of Youth titled “Politics of Disruption: Youth Climate Activisms and Education” looks to alternative spaces where youth are taking action, shifting relations, and making their voices heard. While streets in the Global North remain quiet in comparison with 2019, types of activism from a multiplicity of Global South contexts take up alternative knowledges in alternative ways, demonstrating the agency of young people to respond contextually to their own lived realities. At times, young people take on everyday, relational, and cultural forms of resistance, including where structural injustices persist; youth climate activism continues to shapeshift in response to political constraints. Variation in structural conditions and support networks leads to uneven possibilities for youth to enact social change. Together, youth experiences interrogate dominant ideologies in education, as well as the ways education systems are implicated in broader colonial–capitalist, industrial, and neoliberal systems. Within restrictive systems, youth activism expands space within formal education as participants hack, bypass, revamp, and creatively open up spaces for youth agency, justice, and political possibility. Altogether, climate activism offers both direct and indirect provocations to education systems (Karsgaard et al., n.d.), to which the authors collectively and carefully attend.

2. Challenging Colonialism Through Global South Activism

While educational research has embraced the global youth climate strikes, particularly in the Global North, articles in this Special Issue explore activism in other contexts, revealing diversity among activisms informed by place and context and reflecting epistemic plurality. The activism of marginalized youth and young people in the Global South, including the “South of the North” (Andreotti et al., 2018), is often invisible and less attended to, particularly where activism is culturally unacceptable (Chang, 2022), criminalized (Ceric, 2020), underground, or perhaps unrecognized as activism, reflecting hermeneutical epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). Countering the coloniality of knowledge production (Mignolo, 2013) in relation to youth climate activism, authors in this Special Issue attend to marginalized activisms, particularly as these resist and subvert colonial knowledge systems and mobilize alternative knowledge in alternative ways.

In “Promoting Food Security and Biodiversity Restoration: Insights from Kenyan Youth Climate Change Activists,” Emmanuel Simiyu Wanjala counters the coloniality of knowledge production by utilizing a Youth Participatory Action Research approach to center the lived expertise, environmental practices, and context-specific solutions of Kenyan youth. Through two initiatives, the Ondiri Wetland Botanical Garden and the One Million Trees for Kilifi project, Wanjala traces how eight youth activists address food insecurity, malnutrition, and biodiversity loss in nonviolent ways by cultivating vegetables and fruit orchards in partnership with schools and local communities. Collaboratively enacted, such activities prioritize interspecies relationality and foster health among both human and more-than-human beings, toward the thriving of future generations. By centering the lived expertise of Kenyan youth, and putting forward concrete methods for co-research with youth, Wanjala disrupts extractive knowledge hierarchies and illustrates how community-rooted activism generates locally meaningful climate responses.

Centering youth co-creators from South Africa and Guadeloupe—communities disproportionately affected by climate change—Dena Arya, Lydia Ayame Hiraide, Alude Mahali, and Kristina Johnstone challenge the coloniality of knowledge that structures dominant climate justice discourses in “Amplifying Global Majority Youth Voices Through Creating Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces: The Theatre of Climate Action (ToCA) Project.” Foregrounding artistic research as a decolonial methodology, the article examines how collaborative theater-making within the Theatre of Climate Action (ToCA) project can disrupt hegemonic, text-based ways of knowing. By mobilizing Safe(r), Brave(r), and Riskier Spaces frameworks, the project cultivates modes of knowledge production that privilege embodied understandings and collective meaning-making. These approaches contest universalizing abstractions and epistemic hierarchies that have historically marginalized global majority perspectives, instead enabling youth to articulate alternative narratives of climate injustice grounded in their sociomaterial realities. The article argues that such co-created artistic processes offer vital interventions into the epistemic inequities underpinning the climate crisis, advancing cognitive justice as foundational to climate justice.

Centering Pacific youth perspectives on climate change in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Ali Glasgow’s “Pacific Youth Activists Encountering Climate Change: Implications for Education” reveals how Western-centric educational systems marginalize Indigenous knowledges and climate realities. Drawing on Talanoa methodology and a Pacific Values framework, the study demonstrates that Pacific young people experience climate change not as an abstract scientific concept but as an existential threat. Young people’s testimonies highlight systemic racism, teacher unpreparedness, and curricular erasure, all of which reproduce colonial knowledge hierarchies. By foregrounding Pacific understandings of environment, the article argues for a decolonial shift that delinks from dominant Western pedagogies and recenters Pacific epistemologies as legitimate and necessary. The findings call for transformative changes to education policy, teacher education, and pedagogy that position Pacific young people not as passive recipients of Western climate narratives but as knowledge holders whose experiences, values, and activism contribute to more just, culturally sustaining climate education.

3. Everyday, Relational, and Cultural Activisms

Another theme in this Special Issue involves a rethinking of youth climate activism beyond the familiar register of mass mobilization, public protest, and direct confrontation. Rather than centering activism solely in streets, strikes, or institutional arenas, these articles draw attention to the ways youth are relocating climate action into more intimate, everyday spaces through art, education, research, care, and community practice. In these accounts, activism is not a singular political event but a transformative approach to life, shaped by context, political constraint, and the ongoing work of sustaining oneself, one’s community, and the more-than-human world.

In “‘Do Not Go Through the System Passively’: Integrating Environmental Studies and Ethnic Studies Through a Social Justice Outdoor Education Program for High School Learners,” Laura Moorhead and Jeremy Jiménez foreground the quiet, slow, and deeply relational forms of climate activism that unfold in the everyday life of a school. Focusing on the Wilderness and Arts Literacy Collaborative (WALC) in San Francisco, they show how young people—many navigating poverty, racialized exclusion, or educational precarity—become climate actors not through protest but through processes of healing, reconnection, and identity work. In a braided curriculum that integrates environmental studies, ethnic studies, and outdoor education, students learn to see land, community, and self as inseparable, relocating climate action into intimate, everyday spaces of learning and relation. Advocacy emerges not as a distant political demand but as a felt responsibility toward place and people. Importantly, the teachers themselves enact activism through pedagogy, modeling what it means to refuse passivity within systems never designed for their students’ flourishing. In this way, activism takes shape less as a singular political event than as an orientation to life grounded in care and responsibility, expanding dominant understandings of how climate justice work is lived and sustained.

Similarly attentive to the politics of the everyday, Turkan Firinci Orman’s study “Everyday Activism Performances and Liminal Political Positionings of Early Youth in Bulgaria” conceptualizes everyday activism as a set of liminal, often understated practices that unfold through identity formation, school life, and interpersonal relations. Rather than overt confrontation, youth activism appears here as subtle negotiation, ethical positioning, and incremental change—forms of action that may remain unrecognized as “activism” precisely because they do not align with dominant, Global North imaginaries of political action. Orman’s analysis challenges the assumption that non-confrontational activism is apolitical, instead revealing how such practices can be deeply political responses to cultural norms, institutional expectations, and constrained civic space.

Jensine Raihan and colleagues extend this reframing further by positioning research itself as a site of everyday activism. In “Research-as-Solidarity, with Youth Leading the Way,” activism takes shape through relational, care-based research practices that prioritize accountability to communities over academic extraction or visibility. By working alongside youth and communities rather than on them, the authors articulate an approach to climate action grounded in solidarity. Here, activism unfolds through listening, co-learning, and sustained presence—practices that resist both the spectacle of protest and the hierarchies of conventional knowledge production.

Taken together, these contributions unsettle narrow definitions of youth climate activism that privilege visibility, confrontation, or institutional recognition. They suggest instead that, under conditions of inequality, surveillance, fatigue, or exclusion, youth often enact climate politics through forms of action that are quieter, relational, and culturally embedded, resonating with emerging work on non-confrontational activism that understands political engagement as strategic, situated, and oriented toward sustaining life rather than staging opposition (see You & Auld, 2025). These modes of activism may be less legible within dominant political frameworks, yet they are no less transformative.

4. Activism Amid Political Constraints

While the previous section highlights how youth relocate climate action into everyday and relational domains, the contributions that follow foreground contexts in which such relocations are not only strategic but necessary—where visibility itself is dangerous and political action must be carefully negotiated. In these settings, climate activism cannot take the form of protest at all. Political repression, surveillance, structural inequality, and material precarity fundamentally reshape whether and how young people can act. Rather than interpreting these conditions as the absence of activism, the articles in this section examine how youth climate politics are reworked under constraint, emerging through lived experience, strategic restraint, and forms of engagement that exceed conventional movement-based imaginaries. Here, survival itself becomes political, and activism takes shape in ways attuned to risk, context, and unequal power.

In “Experiencing Climate Change and Living Through It—South African Youth Perspectives on Activism, Action and Justice,” Tyler Booth and Harriet Thew examine youth climate action in a context shaped by deep historical inequality and ongoing socio-economic precarity. For the young people in their study, climate activism does not begin with abstract environmental knowledge or future-oriented risk but with the embodied realities of drought, unreliable water and energy systems, polluted air, food insecurity, and unemployment. Climate politics emerge from living through a crisis rather than learning about it from a distance. Activism is framed as survival and responsibility—an insistence that climate governance and education confront the entangled legacies of apartheid, extractivism, and energy injustice. In foregrounding lived experience as a catalyst for political engagement, Booth and Thew challenge protest-centric, Global North assumptions and show how climate action in South Africa is inseparable from broader struggles for dignity and systemic transformation.

Rezvan Erfani’s “Climate Activism in Our Part of the World and Methodological Insights on How to Study It” turns to youth environmental engagement under authoritarian governance in Egypt, where visibility itself is politically risky. Drawing on ethnographic research in Cairo and Sharm El-Sheikh, Erfani introduces the concept of “environmental non-activism” to describe the strategic, low-profile forms of engagement adopted by youth and environmental organizations. Here, overt confrontation is avoided in favor of practices that emphasize environmental awareness and lifestyle changes—forms of action that may be tolerated by the state while remaining politically ambivalent. Erfani shows how repression reshapes not only activism but also the conditions of research itself, detailing methodological strategies such as counter-interviews, careful relationship-building, and institutional protection. Many participants reject the label “activist” altogether, underscoring how political context governs what can be named, enacted, and studied as climate action.

Taken together, these contributions unsettle assumptions that equate activism with visibility, confrontation, or formal participation. They demonstrate how youth climate politics are reworked under constraint through survival, strategic restraint, and situated engagement. In doing so, this section calls for climate education and research frameworks that take geopolitics seriously, recognizing that what counts as activism, who can act, and how action can be studied are always shaped by unequal and often hostile political conditions.

5. Youth–Adult Relations and Institutional Encounters

Another theme across this Special Issue concerns youth–adult relations and the institutional terrains within which youth climate activisms are enabled, constrained, or redirected. While youth activism is often seen as oppositional or autonomous, these contributions foreground how young people’s opportunities to enact social change are deeply shaped by adult partners, organizational structures, and institutional logics.

In “Applying the 7P Framework to Youth-Adult Partnerships in Climate Organizing Spaces: ‘If We Are Going to Be the Ones Living with Climate Change, We Should Have a Say,’” Ellen Field and Lilian Barraclough focus on the conditions under which youth–adult collaborations can meaningfully support youth leadership rather than reproduce hierarchical control. Drawing on focus groups with high school students involved in an Environmental Youth Council in Canada, the authors revisit and expand Cahill and Dadvand’s (2018) 7P framework to articulate key dimensions of ethical and effective youth–adult partnerships. Purpose, positioning, perspectives, power relations, protection, place, and process are identified as foundational elements, with the authors further proposing the inclusion of psychological support and positive impact. Together, these dimensions foreground the relational and affective labor required to sustain youth engagement, while emphasizing the importance of shared ownership, transparent power-sharing, and institutional accountability to youth-defined goals. Rather than assuming participation is inherently empowering, the framework surfaces how adults and adult-led organizations must actively reconfigure their practices to create conditions in which youth agency can flourish.

Meanwhile, in “Empowering the Collective: Redefining Youth Activism and Political Dynamics within Nonprofit Organizations,” Aurora Nicolas and colleagues critically examine the ways institutional contexts can delimit youth activism, even when organizations publicly state commitments to sustainability, equity, and youth empowerment. Written collaboratively by youth activists involved in the afterschool program at a science museum in Northern California, Climate Activists Regenerating Earth (CARE), the article exposes the structural contradictions of youth participation within a neoliberal nonprofit sector. The authors trace three ways youth engagement is curtailed in this context: misalignments between professed values and institutional practices, including partnerships with corporate polluters; tokenization and adult control that reward passive participation while constraining youth autonomy; and policy and funding structures that restrict more radical forms of youth activism. These three dynamics, the authors argue, illustrate how adultism operates in this context by reducing youth activism to symbolic participation while prioritizing organizational reputation and donor interests. Youth activism is permitted only as long as it remains non-disruptive and aligned with institutional interests. In response to these dynamics, the study calls for reimagining youth–adult relations through shared governance, co-created policies, and direct youth access to resources, emphasizing that authentic intergenerational collaboration requires dismantling hierarchical power structures and centering youth autonomy in decision-making.

Both contributions underscore that youth climate activisms often unfold through uneven encounters with institutions—encounters that can either expand or constrain the imaginaries, capacities, and futures available to young people. Addressing these encounters is essential for understanding not only how youth activism is shaped but also how institutions themselves might be transformed to enable meaningful youth engagement in climate justice.

6. Education Systems as Sites of Both Harm and Possibility

Across the suite of articles in this Special Issue, we see the ways education is complicit in generating the climate crisis and perpetuating climate injustice. Embedded within broader neoliberal socio-economic systems or authoritarian political contexts, many education sites embody prevailing worldviews and are shaped in relation to dominant structures, thereby contributing to climate injustice, restricting youth climate learning and action, and imposing a multiplicity of violences upon young people, from tokenization to outright oppression. In such contexts, youth agency is significantly curtailed. In the face of these realities, authors in this Special Issue point to the need for education research to carefully explore structural conditions within education and across its broader social, cultural, economic, and political relations. By addressing the institutionalization of worldviews from colonialism to adultism, patterns of repression and surveillance, and institutional barriers, education research can better elucidate the dynamics affecting youth agency and support the rights of young people to articulate their perspectives, respond to climate injustices, and drive change. Further, significant shifts to educational decision-making and funding structures are necessary if formal education is to adequately respond to marginalized youth. Climate education research must take power seriously, rather than assuming participation is inherently empowering or emancipatory. This requires climate education research to develop methods capable of attending to slow, affective, relational, and risky forms of political engagement that are often rendered invisible by outcome-driven or event-based frameworks.

While many articles depict educational inflexibility and injustice, authors across this Special Issue also highlight youth agency as they hack, bypass, revamp, and creatively resist, whereby they either expand space within formal education for climate action or move beyond it into alternative spaces. At times, young people appropriate educational knowledge and power in solidarity with marginalized groups through research and creative practices. In other cases, activists shift systems by disrupting disciplinarity to serve the justice and well-being of both land and oppressed communities. Where institutional timelines favor structured learning, discrete projects, and immediate, measurable outcomes, youth climate action often unfolds over long, uneven timescales, through waiting, endurance, repetition, solidarity, and care. These contributions also foreground temporal injustice, revealing how youth climate action unfolds across delayed, uneven, and often suspended timelines that clash with institutional demands for immediacy, visibility, and measurable impact. Such efforts challenge event-based models of political engagement and outcome-based understandings of action in climate education. Collectively, these articles share how the work of transforming education can emerge from young people themselves, where their knowledge and experience offer an expertise that calls into question formal systems.

Across the articles shared here, education systems are revealed as sites of both harm and possibility. As we continue in the current period of relative youth climate activism “silence,” we recommend that research stay within the tension between education’s complicity in extractive, colonial systems and its potential to be reworked from within and beyond institutional boundaries. We also recommend deepened consideration of the entanglements of climate activism with other forms of much needed social activism, including pro-Palestine solidarity, anti-imperialist resistance, worker strikes, human rights movements, Indigenous land and water, protection, and anti-pipeline activism. Attending not only to human activism but also the agencies of elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and of all beings, may deepen activism through integrative and relational responses to injustices. By more deeply understanding climate and other social movements intersectionally, solidaristically, and across human and more-than-human relations, education may be better positioned to respond to the deep roots of injustice toward healthier and more just futures for all.