Young people at a crossroads (YPX): Negotiations of environmental knowledges, practices and subjectivities in immigrant homes at a time of climate crisis

A two-year project (Jan 2021-Feb 2023) into families, diverse environmental knowledges and young people’s responses to the climate crisis funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of their New Investigator Award programme.

Project objectives

To interrogate the dominant political and cultural framings of climate change education that second-generation immigrants and other young people gain in school and other sites of formal and informal learning.
To investigate how dominant and marginalised environmental knowledges, practices and political subjectivities are exchanged and negotiated between generations in immigrant households.
To explore possibilities for cross-cultural exchanges of environmental knowledges, practices and political subjectivities through action research in schools.
To develop educational resources to enable intergenerational and cross-cultural environmental knowledge transfers to be replicated in climate change education in secondary schools in the UK, Australia and beyond.

Project background

As youth climate activism grows around the world, this project will generate unique understandings into how families composed of first- and second-generation immigrants from the Global South (GS) are responding to lived experiences of climate crisis in two ethnically diverse cities: Manchester and Melbourne.

As well as growing up at a historic crossroads in terms of political and societal responses to the climate crisis, second-generation immigrants are at an additional crossroads in their family life, between different sets of political and cultural values, economic possibilities and environmental characteristics that have roots in (at least) two countries.

This pioneering project will be the first of its kind to conduct research with this often overlooked group of young people, generating insights from two cities, with young people from a range of ethnic backgrounds. The question at the heart of the project is how second-generation immigrants - part of the most ‘climate change-aware’ generation alive today - discuss and negotiate responses to the climate crisis with parents who may have first-hand experience of living with resource and climate uncertainty, yet whose knowledge is often not valued in Global North (GN) contexts.

This area of research is both timely and important because at a time when deep-rooted adaptations are urgently needed in societies already feeling the effects of climate change, existing research by the project team (briefly detailed below) and other researchers has found that GS immigrants hold valuable knowledge that is often not known to or fully appreciated by the public and by policymakers in the GN contexts where they are living.

Yet no research has yet explored the crucial role - actual or potential - that the children of immigrants play in carrying and exchanging environmental knowledges between the private space of the home and public and institutional spaces such as schools, as well as symbolically between different generations and cultural backgrounds. The project will advance understanding of how intergenerational and cross-cultural tensions and opportunities for learning play out in immigrant homes and in schools in Manchester and Melbourne.

Existing research by project team members

It’s what I’ve always done: Continuity and change in the household sustainability practices of Somali migrants in the UK

MacGregor et al. (2019)

This article presents findings from ‘Environmental Sustainability in Manchester’, a pilot project conducted with 56 adult Somali immigrants in Manchester. The project aimed to explore Somali immigrants’ everyday practices and use these to reconsider often narrow and culturally-specific understandings of sustainability that can exclude or overlook alternative understandings and practices. The project was carried out by Sherilyn MacGregor (YPX project mentor), Catherine Walker (YPX principal investigator) and Tally Katz-Gerro (academic advisor to YPX).

Barriers to and enablers of sustainable practices

Head et al. (2021)

This article presents findings from ‘Sustainability and climate change adaptation: unlocking the potential of ethnic diversity’, a research programme comprising nine sub-studies and involving 323 migrants from 33 countries in south-eastern Australia. The overall aim was to conduct research with migrants in Australia to consider the diversity of ways in which migrants’ sustainability practices might emerge or be hindered. Sub-studies focused on how migrants’ faith, cultural norms, embodied habits, preferences and values shape sustainability practices. This research was led by Lesley Head (YPX co-investigator), and Natascha Klocker (YPX project mentor) was a co-investigator on the study.

Members of the research team have also authored research articles that review existing studies of public responses to climate change and sustainability challenges and call for more research to be conducted with immigrants from the Global South/Majority World on this topic. See Head et al. (2018) and Walker (2020) – the latter has a focus on young people specifically.