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Public Lecture: Planetary Youth Research – Academic active hope as a response to the polycrisis

The Department of Youth, Community and Migration Studies invites you to attend a public lecture delivered by Prof. Sofia Laine, from the Youth Research Society, Finland.

The depth of the ecological crisis – or the comprehensive crisis that Henig and Knight (2023) refer to as the polycrisis – challenges all kinds of developmental tasks, but also the very models of human lifespan development.

The 2020s are marked by mass extinctions and climate anomalies that are accelerating in intensity and frequency but also causing global political turmoil. The scale and scope of the triple planetary crisis (i.e. climate emergency, biodiversity collapse and pervasive pollution) pose an urgent and systemic threat to the rights of children and young people worldwide, intertwining with ongoing geopolitical turbulences. In respond to this polycrisis, Planetary Youth Research (Laine 2023) is a new framework proposal that aims to encourage youth research to turn towards a ‘global ethic’.

It has four key emphases, in short: 1) investigating how to achieve sustainable living conditions for future generations, together with young people if possible; 2) decolonializing youth research, global South youth research and research on planetary citizenship (e.g. Salonen et al. 2024); 3) analyzing young people’s relationships with nature and planetary wellbeing (e.g. Elo et. al. 2023); and 4) exploring more sustainable and ethical ways to balance action, emotion and rest in the more-than-human world (e.g. Pihkala 2022).

In this public lecture, Laine will present the four pillars of the Planetary Youth Research framework (Laine 2023) and show diverse examples of current research contributing to different dimensions of this framework. Special emphasis is given to what she calls ‘academic active hope’ as a method of conducting research. This approach is developed from the work of Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (new edition 2022), involving researchers and young people to become active participants in the process of achieving our goals in planetary wellbeing and sustainability transformation, and, where possible, realising them.

For more info, you can send an email.