Our approach
The Striking Voices project has sought to foreground young people’s critiques, in their own terms, of the structural failures of status quo politics, alongside their political demands and successes, and their creation of more just forms of living-relating-teaching-learning. Co-creating and amplifying stories of young people’s climate justice organising has intended to counter deficit representations of young people as ‘victims’ of climate change, and to highlight strength, inventiveness and fun, amidst exhaustion, ambivalence and frustration.
The project’s transgenerational participatory approach is informed by:
- Social justice-oriented dialogical methodologies (Fals Borda, 2006; Freire, 1970),
- Feminist critical youth participatory action research methodologies (Cammarota & Fine, 2008)
- Intersectional participatory methodologies for climate justice (Rigon, 2025)
- Multi-sited ethnographic methodologies (Marcus, 1999) that move between and across community organising, civic, school, and digital spaces.
This approach has contributed to the formation of project methods that:
- Catalyse conversations about climate justice
- Collectively create work that continues further conversations and action.
Climate (in)justice and intersecting injustices
Climate justice has been an animating concept for those involved in diverse and dynamic forms of climate advocacy and action in recent years. This project has reflected, with young climate justice organisers, their mentors, and teachers, on the concept and praxis of climate justice, in their own terms, as they understand, learn, teach and practice it.
The working definition of climate justice that we offer below is informed by these conversations with young organisers, mentors and teachers, the frames used by the climate justice campaigns that we have followed and participated in, and the academic literature that we have read.
For those working for climate justice, this concept:
- Binds together concerns for climate action with resistance to social injustices, naming their shared root causes: unjust and destructive relations to the Earth and to other humans
- Draws attention to how those who are first and worst affected by climate-related impacts are most frequently those who have contributed the least to carbon emissions: including First Peoples, communities of colour, lower-income communities and more-than-human species
- Foregrounds the wisdom and leadership of First Peoples, who have cared for Country since time immemorial
- Emphasises the intersectionality of climate change with other forms of historical and ongoing social, economic and political injustices, noting how the impacts of climate change compound these injustices
- Attempts to forge solidarities across intersecting struggles including First Peoples’ land and water rights, gender justice, racial justice, economic justice and disability justice
- Confronts and seeks to transform the unjust social and institutional structures, relations and ways of being which create and maintain the uneven distribution of the harshest impacts of climate change
- Demands that climate solutions and energy transitions are just and equitable, leaving no one behind.
- Seeks to model and pre-figure more just, accountable, reciprocal and reparative social and ecological relations and worlds in everyday practices.