UC Davis

In the last few years, young people around the globe have increasingly been engaging with climate change via collective, political activism. In this dissertation research, I explore youth climate activism in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. To do this, I spent seven months as a participant-observer with the Sunrise Movement, a national youth climate activism group. During this time, I conducted twenty oral history interviews with racially, economically and gender diverse youth within this group and gathered archival materials. I then analyzed these data sources to answer questions about the experiences and understandings of these young climate activists. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I explore the young people’s experiences of formalized climate education, questioning the extent to which it has been “a critical agent” (United Nations, n.d.) in their activism. From this analysis, I provide recommendations on climate pedagogy. In the second chapter, I explore the narrative the young people have about becoming climate activism. This illuminates the pathways and factors shaping climate activism among young people. In the third chapter, I examine how this group is defining and understanding the issue of climate change and put this in conversation with previous ways of defining it. The fourth chapter shares about a community-engaged element of this research, which is a website that showcases parts of the oral histories and provides tools for educators around climate change.