‘Blah, Blah, Blah … [not] business as usual’: politics through the lens of young female climate leaders

ABSTRACT

Girls and young women have played leading roles in Australian climate politics since 2018. The distinctive age-cohort and gendered characteristics of this movement and the implications of this for contemporary politics and democracy are not well documented. Focusing on School Strike 4 Climate movement, we ask how to best understand this development? Is their appearance as leaders and speakers in political forums politically significant, and if so, how? We use 41 speeches to examine what ‘being political’ means for them. We identify the reflexively gendered ways these young women are experiencing – and remaking – contemporary politics. This is consonant with a tradition of political theory developed by Arendt, Wolin and Rancière’s idea of ‘the political’ as what reveals the exclusion of people who aren’t normally allowed to take part.

2019年以来，年轻女子在澳大利亚的环境政治中发挥了引领作用。该运动明显的年龄及性别特征及其对当代政治和民主的影响，迄今研究不多。本文聚焦SS4C运动，试图对之做出正确的理解。该运动作为政治论坛的领导者和发言者，具有政治意义么？如果有的话，又是怎么一种情况呢？我们分析了41篇讲话，看看“政治”对她们意味着什么。我们发现这些女青年以直接的性别方式体验着并再造着当代政治。这与阿伦特、沃林、朗西埃等人发展出的政治理论传统颇为契合，他们认为政治就是将一些社会规范所不容的人排斥在政治之外。

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• politics
• girls
• speech-making
• gender

Introduction

Over the last three decades, large numbers of children and young people have engaged in climate change politics trying to persuade governments and others to mitigate global warming. While student political participation is not novel, it was only in 2018 after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg inspired the global School Strike 4 Climate movement, that youth-led global warming activism achieved a level of public attention and political significance.

In Australia, Harriet O’Shea Carre, Milou Albrecht and Callum Neilson-Bridgefoot, leading a group of mainly 14-year-old school students from Castlemaine, Victoria, organised local strikes, leading to the first coordinated protests across Australia on 30 November 2018 (Collin and McCormack 2019; Robb 2019; White et al. 2021). By 20th September 2019, Australia’s School Strike 4 Climate movement coordinated an estimated 350,000 school students taking part in the largest-ever climate protest event in Australia. While many people have trouble acknowledging young people’s capacity for political activity, there is nothing new about children and young people being central to political debates and action (e.g. Bessant 2021; Brocklehurst 2003, 79–92; Grasso and Bessant 2018). Nevertheless, there are distinctive features that characterise contemporary climate change movements: in particular, they are actions in which being young and female matters.

In this article, we focus on the Australian School Strike 4 Climate movement which has been sustained and predominantly led by young women. Australian governments have been unwilling to address the global warming crisis, reflecting state capture by the fossil fuel industries since the early 1990s (Lucas 2021). While there is a strong tradition of Australian scholarship addressing young people’s political participation (Bessant 2022; Vromen 2018, 208–219) there is relatively little work to date on young people’s politics, climate change and gender (cf. Tattersall, Hinchliffe, and Varsha 2022). We anticipate that our research will contribute to international research on this issue (Kimball 2019; Noth and Tonzer 2022).

One distinctive feature of this recent efflorescence of political participation globally is its heavily gendered nature. Surveys of recent climate protests confirm the pre-eminent role played by girls and young women (Bowman 2020, 295–305; Bessant 2021; 2022; Collin et al. 2020; Noth and Tonzer 2022). This is a significant development because historically youth political participation mainly involved young men and much of the literature which focused on young people’s political participation was gender-blind (Bessant 2022, 894; Kimball 2019). Holt (2019) observed: ‘(s)ince 2014 young women have been the public face of the climate movement and led the first People’s Climate March, which attracted over 400,000 people worldwide, most of them women’. Other observers of the Fridays for Future and School Strike 4 Climate in 2018–2019 also noted how they were unlike any previous campaigns: ‘They were young, diverse – and overwhelmingly girls’ (Kaplan 2019). One study of the September 2019 mobilisation in nineteen cities across the globe, confirmed the dominant role of primary-school girls and female secondary students as initiators, organisers and participants (de Moor et al. 2019). Nearly 60% of participants were female and while women were in the majority across every age group, young women strongly out-numbered young men among participants under 19 (De Moor et al. 2020).

A related feature of recent movements is the leadership exercised by girls and young women. Figures like Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, Aka Nivia^na Morch Pedersen, Autumn Peltier, Julieta Martínez, Howey Ou, Harriet O’Shea and Anjali Sharmi have taken centre stage, by initiating and leading climate action movements. These young women and many like them, have made compelling, authoritative speeches. They have reanimated the message that politicians and citizens need to ‘listen to the [climate] science’. This message informed demands made by the Fridays for Future and School Strike 4 Climate movements which attracted global mainstream media attention and revitalised global warming action. These young leaders used social and traditional media, extra-parliamentary sites and international forums to put formal political leaders on notice. Their speeches challenged the plausibility of a future worth having which so many governments, corporate elites, adults and parents complacently claimed they are preparing children and young people for. Their speech-making has not only electrified their respective political systems and their audience, but has re-energised and organised collective action.

While acknowledging these features, important theoretical and interpretative issues remain. In this article, we ask how can we best understand the entry of children and young people, and in particular girls and young women, as key actors in the public sphere and more specifically in contemporary climate politics? Is their appearance leading and speaking in political forums at the front of climate justice movements significant politically and, if so, why? Drawing on early findings from a research project investigating student climate activism and its implications for democracy, our focus here is on speech-making by girls and young women between 2018 and 2022.¹, ²

Background and rationale

In framing these questions about this new phenomenon and its political significance, we note how the art and craft of political leadership and the role played by speech-making has long been central to politics and its study. A dominant tradition of political theorists, from Aristotle through Machiavelli to Weber, has focused on government and the exercise of institutionalised power in pursuit of order. This concern with the political as governance and order, may partly explain why one traditional focus in the studies of leadership and speech-making has been on speeches by older male leaders like Pericles, Lincoln or Churchill (Xenos 1988). It’s a tradition of inquiry informed by an interest in establishing how speech-making by political leaders ‘reflects underlying doctrines of government’ (Tulis 1987, 13; cf. Medhurst 1996, xiv). The predominance of girls and young women in some contemporary social movements highlights the need to think outside this tradition and consider the implications of movements like School Strike 4 Climate for contemporary politics and democracy.

Another reason to pay attention to these speeches relates to the relative success the girls and young women enjoyed (Bowman 2020; Collin et al. 2020). Besides organising demonstrations, these networks of young women ran effective social media campaigns and mounted significant legal challenges (White et al. 2021). In an era of polymedia, these speeches are ‘taking place’ in multiple settings and are being recirculated across many channels, multiplying their audiences and expanding their temporal reach (e.g. Kimball 2019). They have addressed their peers, communities, political and industry leaders, calling for urgent action on climate change. Their speech-making and displays of leadership have been heard and seen by millions of people, shaped public opinion, energised collective action and held traditional political leaders to account.

Yet with a few exceptions, scholars in political studies, youth studies and discourse and rhetorical studies, have paid little attention to the politics of girls and young women. Girls and young women under 18, face a ‘double disadvantage’: they cannot take part in the formal electoral politics of a liberal-democracy, and they are marginalised in political studies as ‘women’ and as ‘children’. It has long been recognised that girls’ political participation has been overlooked in political science and cognate disciplines (Driscoll 2002, 11). Our survey of the Australian Journal of Political Science shows that between 2018 and 2022 it has not published work addressing contemporary youth or student political movements, or politics in which girls are central. Likewise, the International Feminist Journal of Politics has not addressed contemporary student or girls’ political activism, their role in climate change or other contentious issues. When scholars do examine girl’s ‘political participation’ they tend to focus on their potential to become future political actors while paying no attention to their current political activity (Bent 2013, 174). This is not to ignore work by Vromen (2003), Pickard, Bowman, and Arya (2020) or Tattersall, Hinchliffe, and Varsha (2022), or concerns expressed by scholars like Harris (2004), Vromen (2003; 2018) and Taft (2019) about the scholarly marginalisation of political activity by girls and young women in political science and international relations.

Here we build on a small body of valuable work by researchers, mostly in cultural studies or the study of rhetoric, who have examined how young people frame and construct narratives of climate justice in ‘speech-making’ (Bach 2022; Fähnrich 2018; Feldman 2020). Attention has been given to Thunberg’s speeches, underpinning claims that youth-led activism developed momentum in 2018 after her intervention in Stockholm. Feldman documents how young climate activists constructed campaigns by drawing on scientific evidence and moral emotional claims (Feldman 2020, 1). Bach asked: how have these young activists positioned themselves to speak to and on behalf of a ‘public’ with diverse even antagonistic dispositions about the threat of climate change, while also speaking to scientific communities where an overwhelming consensus makes that same case? Drawing on Edbauer’s (2005) account of rhetorical ecologies, Bach argues that the young rhetoricians use their voices to emphasise the urgency of climate change, which they do as participants in a changeful and historical network of social relationships.

Yet mindful of the ways the obvious often escapes us, and acknowledging the novelty of what we now see, these studies of the rhetoric of contemporary speeches by young female leaders have not addressed the political significance of these interventions. The political significance of the intersections of age and gender has yet to be adequately studied or understood. We concur with Dixon’s argument that we need ‘a theoretical positioning that is grounded in young people’s own lived experience and daily life’ which acknowledges ‘that young people are powerful decision-makers with important ideas in their own right’ (Dixon 2022, 313, author’s stress). Our work joins a call for ‘theoretical and methodological innovations’ that can move beyond traditional ‘adultist’- and ‘rigid, top-down understandings’ (Bowman 2020) of young people’s political participation (Collin 2015; Wall 2021).

We also argue that a gendered analysis of what is taking place is needed, analysis that begins with the perspectives of those young people involved. We want to establish if ‘gender reflexivity’, which has so far been seen as a practice valued in social science research (e.g. Ward 2016), can be applied to the self-awareness of young climate activists. While it is generally assumed that being reflexively aware refers to the value of understanding how a researcher’s gender affects their research, this can also apply to activists themselves and their action in ways that affords valuable insight. We do this by addressing three specific research questions.

First, how do those girls and young women frame their speech-making and is there evidence in the speeches of a reflexively gendered or feminist framing or thinking?³ Do we see reflectivity on the part of these young people about their identity as girls and young women? Second, is there evidence of a reflexive understanding of ‘being political’ by the speechmakers? Is there evidence, e.g. in these speeches of ‘answering back’ in response to representations of them as young and female: who should not be taking up public space? Finally, do they see themselves as challenging this ‘natural’ or ‘normalised’ exclusion? We ask in this last question mindful of a tradition of disruptive theory of the political developed by Arendt (1958), Wolin (2004) and Rancière’s (2010) idea of ‘the political’ as that which reveals the exclusion of people who aren’t allowed to take part.

We do not understand ‘politics’ or ‘the political’ as restricted to ideas, practices and scholarship about modes of governance, electoral politics, legitimacy and policy-making which seems to be the default disposition of conventional political science. We move away from the more conventional state-centric approaches to politics or what Rancière calls ‘policing.’ The approach we offer understands ‘politics’ as a contest of ideas in the public sphere (agon), as processes of public deliberation and the creation and mobilisation of publics around issues along with the advancement of claims by those normally denied a part in deliberative and decision-making process.

Method

To address these questions, we identified and curated a collection of 41 ‘public speeches’ by girls and young women on the frontline of the youth climate movement in Australia since 2018. The search was conducted from August to September 2022. We analyse those speeches to establish what was being said, before discussing the political significance of those public speeches in the discussion section of this article.

To identify the speeches, we used a broad definition of ‘speech-making’ recognising how it takes many forms. Given the range of platforms and spaces in which speeches are given and how they are not published or recorded in a single archive, we adopted a broad organic approach. We included eight different kinds of speeches: protest speeches at mass rallies (8); opinion pieces published in mainstream media (14); interviews with young activists through various public channels and platforms, e.g. television, podcast and magazines (8); activists addressing the media about their actions (4); open letters (2 speeches); speeches to large conferences (2); excerpts from books where leaders speak about their involvement in the movement (2); and one Ted Talk (1). Where we used video recordings of speeches these were transcribed to text prior to analysis.

We adopted an interpretivist mode of analysis congruent with the hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition which aims to understand the lived experience of social actors (Husserl 1967). According to proponents of this tradition, any observations must be interpreted through the eyes of the participants embedded in their social context, which in this case involves speech-making as political action (Blumer 1968).

Interpretation takes place at two levels. First, it involves viewing the phenomenon from the perspectives of the participants. Secondly, it involves understanding the meanings participants give to their experiences. This requires paying attention to their use of expressive language, which is the approach adopted here. Finally, we used the transcripts of speech-making to ensure the voice of the young people was heard directly and not subjected to social ventriloquism.

There were 22 speech-makers and most were aged 15–17 years old at the time of their speech. The youngest was Lucy Atkin-Bolton who, aged 11, spoke at a School Strike for Climate rally in 2018. Young female Indigenous voices were also prominent as Australian First Nations (e.g. Marlie Thomas a 16 years old Kamilaroi girl) and Pasifika advocates (e.g. Salome Matangi) linked climate justice with justice for First Nations peoples. Another significant feature was the way young people from different ethnic backgrounds stood out including Grace Vegesana, Anjali Sharma and Maiysha Moin who all identified their Indian heritage.

To inform our analysis, we drew on theoretical accounts of the relation between ‘the political’ and democracy developed by Arendt (1968, 223–259), Wolin (1994, 2004) and Rancière (2010). While our findings are preliminary, they provide a basis for further research and discussion. They also raise questions about the extent to which the young climate activists are assuming that ‘democratic change is utterly realizable within the parameters of the existing legal framework and pursue corrective action on that basis’ (Skillington 2019, 8). In what follows we address our research questions, beginning with how the girls and young women framed their speech-making and whether there is evidence of a reflexively gendered or feminist experience or framing.

Gendered reflexivity

Our research set out to establish whether speakers reflected on or used a feminist lens to consider what they did and how they thought about themselves (e.g. as ‘schoolgirls’, as political actors) or the positions they occupied in the particular contexts they found themselves in. We wanted to get some insight into how they represented themselves, and how they saw their place in the public sphere and the issue of climate change. Such reflexive practice matters because it provides some understanding about what is taking place from their perspectives. It also helps establish whether the girls and young women are reproducing certain dominant gendered norms or practices and/or are revising, rejecting some or all of these ways of being.

Based on our analysis, there is a clear, reflexively gendered self-understanding in many of the speeches. As Niamh O’Conner Smith in her opinion piece made clear: ‘It’s no accident that girls are leading the climate movement’. She understands and celebrates the fact girls are leading the way:

You may have noticed some of the key players in this movement are girls. The person who started it all is a girl. Two of the three people who got the strikes going in Australia are girls. This empowers me and fills me with courage for the future of girls in leadership. Girls possess a valuable quality of encouraging people to use their voices for what they believe in and empowering others around them. Not every girl has to lead, but through the many conversations they have every day, they spread the message and make people believe in a power everyone possesses inside of them. (Niamh O’Conner Smith 14 years old Transcript #6, 2019)

Niamh also observed that girls assumed these positions because they have the capacity to start conversations about climate. She refers to the ways they act as a uniting force, spreading ‘courage and hope’ through their words:

Girls possess a valuable quality of encouraging people to use their voices for what they believe in and empowering others around them. Not every girl has to lead, but through the many conversations they have every day, they spread the message and make people believe in a power everyone possesses inside of them. (Niamh O’Conner Smith, 14 years, Transcript #6, 2019)

She continued:

Spreading courage and hope and being able to instil this power in others is an asset girls bring to this movement. With this strength, the climate strikes will only become more powerful. (Niamh O’Conner Smith, 15 years, Transcript #6, 2019)

Other speakers like Maiysha Moin identify an entrenched patriarchal ethos that subjugates women and girls in ways that make them more susceptible to harm caused by climate change.

The leadership of women and gender diverse people must be celebrated, but it must also be acknowledged that key decision-making roles are often held by men in suits and conglomerates operating under patriarchal practices. The activism and advocacy of these young people is often unpaid and undervalued for the change they create. (Maiysha Moin, 17 years, Transcript #8, n.d.)

She continues:

Women are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Women make up the majority of the world’s low – or no-income households, and are more likely to be caring for children or other family members. Patriarchal norms we see across the world have entrenched women’s traditional role as caregivers and men’s traditional role as providers. These gender stereotypes are drivers for gender-based violence following natural disasters, which will occur more frequently and intensely with a changing climate. (Maiysha Moin, 17 years, Transcript#8, n.d.)

Maiysha frames global warming as an extension of gender-based violence:

Globally, the changing climate is a reflection of violence practiced against the planet and environment, it is also a driver of gender-based violence (GBV). Climate justice, a term that encapsulates the ethical, political and environmental dimensions of climate change, is critical to protecting the planet, our future and also ending gender-based violence. (Maiysha Moin, 17 years, Transcript#8, n.d.)

It is not surprisingly this gendered self-understanding provides a rationale for action as women:

To tackle climate change and gender-based violence, global leaders must invoke gender-responsive climate policies, informed by women and gender diverse people, especially First Nations leaders and experts. (Maiysha Moin, 17 years, Transcript#8, n.d.)

These girls are fully aware that they are creating public spaces. Decades ago, McRobbie and Garber’s (1976) work on girls ‘bedroom culture’ identified how girls engage culturally, even as they are excluded from, or are misrecognised in the public sphere. Today conversations that tended to take place in private spheres like bedrooms have moved into the public sphere and broader audiences, courtesy of traditional and social media platforms. There is also evidence of a commitment to inclusivity. The young women recognise how they are bringing people together and are engaged in forms of public making. As Niamh O'Conner Smith explained:

All over the world girls are leading this movement. But we are not alone. And we need everyone, regardless of age, gender and nationality to stand with us to call out the people in power for their inaction; to show the world we need climate justice action’. (Niamh O’Conner Smith, 15 years Transcript #6, 2019)

They also speak of feeling tired of being ignored by governments, leaders and institutions and are now demanding their voices be heard. Herein lies another important aspect of this movement, namely, a self-reflexive understanding of what it means to be political.

We document this by addressing the second research question: is there evidence of a reflexive understanding of ‘being political’ by these young speechmakers? Do the girls and young women, e.g. see themselves as challenging this ‘natural’ order and their ‘normalised’ exclusion?

Political reflexivity

Speech-making as voice is a performative political practice that has long been integral to struggles by subaltern groups making claims for political recognition and attempting to access a range of rights, advance feminist claims or in this case, promote environmental justice. In these cases, voice reaches beyond personal experience and connects to ‘the experiences of a group, collective and shared experience’ (Crossley and Crossley 2001, 1484). The sense of being excluded or ‘left out’ is palpable among these speakers:

A great number of us cannot vote and at the federal election this year, we were silenced by the older generations who will ultimately not live long enough to suffer the consequences of climate inaction. (Maiysha Moin, 17 years, Transcript #7, 2019)

Ava Princi is equally adamant that she be heard:

As a student striker, I’m used to being dismissed by adults. This extends to our political leaders – from the inaction of [Prime Minister] Scott Morrison, to the unambitious climate and energy policies of both major parties, to the disappointing displays of inaction on a global stage. As passionate young people, there is nothing more despairing than watching our leaders have so much ambition for themselves, and so little for our country. (Ava Princi, 17 years, Transcript #9, 2021)

Most speakers express frustration with the continued inaction of Australian governments, and the major political parties. We also see commensurate calls for governments to accept the climate science and take immediate action to secure the future of young people and the futures of generations yet to come. As Jean Hinchliffe says:

My DM to the PM is – to do your job. (Jean Hinchliffe, 15 years, Transcript #40, 2022)

The youngest speaker Lucy Atkin-Bolton says:

It’s disappointing that I know more about leadership than the politicians. I’m here today this week because we as kids need to lead on climate change because the adults are failing. When kids make a mess, adults tell us to clean it up. That’s fair. But when the leaders of our country make a mess, like they’re doing right now about the environment, they leave it for us to clean it up. That’s nowhere near fair. (Lucy Atkin-Bolton, 11 years, Transcript #34, 2018)

In a co-authored opinion piece, Harriet O’Shea and Milou Albrecht agreed:

We want them to treat the climate crisis for the emergency that it is. Climate scientists keep telling us that if we don’t act now it will be disastrous. We need our government to listen to the wisdom of these experts and then act on their advice … What’s the point of learning facts at school if the people in power ignore them? (Harriet O’Shea 14 years and Milou Albrecht, 14 years, Transcript #3, 2018)

These schoolgirls expressed despair at what they see as the selfishness and inaction of government and those engaged in ‘normal politics’. Their point: we feel a responsibility to act because you aren’t. This message is expressed by many young women at the forefront of the movement. As Daisy Jeffrey explained:

Although that phrase “I’m not interested in politics” is still in common use, I hear it less and less from people my age. Like most young people, I want change, but we cannot wait to be in positions of leadership. I believe my generation will change the world. And we are starting now. (Daisy Jeffrey, 17 years, Transcript #22, 2019)

Besides the disruption they promote, they are longer content to be girls or young people who obediently assume their assigned role or identity as ‘a part that has no part’ (Rancière 2010) they are aware they are experimenting with and modelling new ways of doing politics. As Jean Hinchcliffe stated in 2021:

A movement like School Strike 4 Climate is unique in that it is purely kids who are under 18 [below voting age], and elevating those voices and creating a space for them is revolutionary. These kids who show up and skip school, they come with their banners, they’re shouting, they’re yelling, and they really believe in the call. This is what really helps drives social change, because everyone there knows that they’re making a real and tangible difference by being part of something bigger than themselves. (Jean Hinchcliffe 16 years old, Transcript #41, 2021)

Many of the young people understand their willingness to innovate is disruptive in an order where it is generally expected they will conduct themselves as ‘good’ schoolgirls ‘should’ by being subservient or doing as they are told. Part of the dissensus politics they are performing involves the young leaders in ‘answering back’ to adverse or negative representations of them as female, young and political.

Rather than accept that being young and female means being polite, compliant and accommodating, speakers demonstrate a refusal to accept such norms. They speak back against the convention that ‘good children’ do not ‘speak until spoken to’ by emphasising that the School Strike for Climate is not ‘led by adults, but instead by passionate teenagers, there is total freedom and lack of protocol’ (Jean Hinchcliffe, 15 years, Transcript #17, n.d.). There is no play list which means assuming the responsibility of positive freedom and working out ways to make things happen:

Whilst we have levels of support [from some older people], there certainly is no guide to creating change in the way that we do. Everyone involved has to be constantly learning and in communication with others as we approach constant uncharted territories … .

As students we spend so much of our time being told how and when to do things, yet we adjust so well to the freedom of our own movements. We decide on the goals we see that we need. We decide on the image we want for ourselves, and we choose how we’re going to approach our goals in the most effective way that we see possible. Together, we really do thrive. Whilst we can’t vote, we’ve managed to force our way into the conversation. And our power truly has come from our making. (Jean Hinchcliffe, 15 years, Transcript#17, n.d.)

We only need three and a half percent of the population actively participating in this democratic action. Without fail, you see transformative change in society. And it’s difficult to do  …  And we need everyone to get involved to really dramatically transform our society intergenerationally and across all spaces … This can be forms of protest. This can be lobbying your local government, this can be all sorts of different things. But we need to be together as a community. And we need to not see ourselves as individuals working towards one goal but see ourselves as citizens, as a broader community, as a united front that can truly transform the world. (Jean Hinchcliffe, age not stated, Transcript#18, 2022)

This political reflexivity includes the capacity to think back on how they came to be political. In 2019, 17-year-old Daisy Jeffrey reflected on how she became part of the climate movement. She wrote of her longstanding concern for environmental issues describing her reflections on the power of a youth-led movement for gun control in the United States:

Then in February 2018, 17 children and adults were murdered at a high school in Florida, and the following month hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets of Washington DC to demand gun reform. I’d never seen something so powerful, and at once terrifying – youth forced to take their future into their own hands because their politicians would not. At the back of my mind I asked the question: ‘Would young people come together like this to fight for climate action?’ (Daisy Jeffrey, 17 years, Transcript #22, 2019)

As Anjali Sharma made clear, she had assumed the responsibility to act in a fully conscious way:

Like this is not a passion project. This is not something that I do on my day off from school like I do my sport and my music. This is something that I do because I feel like I have the need to like I feel like I have the responsibility to. (Anjali Sharma, 17 years Transcript #12, 2022)

She recalled visiting India when she was eleven and observing the severe impact of pollution and climate change on the health and well-being of children near her family home. She offers a striking rhetorical performance as she takes the Prime Minister to task:

If this were your life, would you still have brought a lump of coal into parliament? After all, don’t be afraid, right? Don’t be scared? … As long as you keep giving us a battle to fight, we will show up every day. Regardless of how much we are knocked back, we will strengthen our resolve and keep going until our vision of safety is more than just a vision – until it is a reality. This is a promise. One that may be angry, drained and fatigued, but a promise, nonetheless. Don’t forget our names, Mr Morrison. I hope it’s been a good time for you, because when we’re in your seats, I doubt they’ll be as comfy. (Anjali Sharma, 17 years, Transcript #13, 2022)

That political reflexivity includes acknowledging the role played by moral emotions. The girls acknowledge how their politics is informed by powerful ethico-political emotions that move them and that galvanise others to engage politically. That is, their ‘speakings and doings’ are performative practices shaped by moral-political emotions like feelings of righteous anger, despair, disillusionment, love, care and the need to protect kin and place. These moral feelings embody ethical judgements and provide a powerful ethical energy that serves as an imperative to act. For example, when thinking about why young people have such power to effect change Jean Hinchcliffe said:

… when young people have this desperation, because we can’t vote and we don’t get a say in the democratic process, naturally we get angry. And our messaging is so direct and strong and hard-hitting because of that. Emotion transforms the issue into something that is human and real, something that you can’t ignore. (Jean Hinchcliffe, 17 years Transcript #41, 2021)

Kamilaroi woman, Marlie Thomas, similarly shows how climate science which is too often represented in highly technical and detached terms, can be grounded in connections between people and place. It’s a technique used to encourage audiences to appreciate that what is happening has a direct impact on all life on earth:

The Living Planet Index calculates that the population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish have halved in less than 50 years, and human activity has driven their demise. I feel the pain of this loss. And I feel the human rights impacts of climate change. Indigenous peoples of the world make up 5% of the total population and are amongst the most vulnerable and the most likely to be impacted by a rapidly changing climate. Yet our views have not been sought. (Marlie Thomas, 16 years, Transcript#20, 2019)

Others responded with no less moral indignation when they were instructed to stay at school because as PM Morrison ‘explained’ ‘Kids’ should go to school … what we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools’. Demonstrating a good appreciation of the value of turning your opponent’s rhetoric back on themselves, Nabilah Chowdhury retorted by agreeing with Morrison:

We shouldn’t have to be here, we should be in school. Obviously we are out on the streets again because the government just won’t listen. Time and time again our government has failed us without a doubt, they refuse to take action so it’s up to us to fight, in order to protect our future. (Nabilah Chowdhury, 16 years Transcript#27, 2021).

As Marlie Thomas a young Indigenous person, explained: ‘I am not here on the authority from the New South Wales Education Minister, I am here on the authority of my elders’ (Marlie Thomas, 16 years Transcript #21, 2019).

In what follows, we consider the significance of these speeches for our understanding of politics and democracy.

Discussion: rethinking the political

Without dismissing the importance of the tradition which sees the political in terms of the institutions and practices of government, we do not accept that ‘the political’ is coterminous with the institutions and practices of political parties and governments, electoral processes, opinion formation and policy-making (e.g. Dowding 2016). Given that a significant challenge has been mounted to this framing in the heterodox accounts of the political by Arendt (1958; 1968; Rancière 2010; Wolin 2004) is there any evidence that these girls and young women see themselves as challenging this conception of the political which among other things presupposes their ‘natural’ or ‘normalised’ exclusion?

We see in these speeches affinities between the politics of these young women and those heterodox accounts of the political. Their speeches point to how those young people are expressing themselves in ways that reflect the disruptive account of politics offered by Arendt, Wolin and Rancière. That is, the climate politics of girls and young women exemplify the democratic and egalitarian impulses evident in those theories.

While Arendt’s work has been criticised by some as being anti-feminist (e.g. O’Brien 1981; Rich 1979) other feminists, however, argue Arendt provides a valuable resource for thinking about what women might do politically in the prevailing crisis of democracy.⁴

Arendt was also no fan of modern (representative) democratic politics which she saw as a degraded practice, reduced to trying to persuade citizens to cast a ballot every three or four years. For Arendt, one consequence of representative government was that political representatives were the only people who experience politics. Politics is best understood as ‘expressing, discussing and deciding’ public matters in public and that these were the activities of ‘freedom’ (Arendt 1979, 235). She advocated instead for more direct forms of democracy of the kind that we see in the action of the young women and girls examined in this article.

Arendt’s emphasis on speech or voice is resonant for our project. Dietz (1994) says Arendt’s work is useful for a feminist understanding of politics and speech-making because it helps clarify what counts as politics and why speech as action-in-the public sphere matters. For Arendt, the public sphere is the very ground of the political while speech is a condition for public-making and for being a part of political life. Without speech or expression, we cannot be political beings. By a ‘public’ Arendt had in mind a political space created and occupied by a plurality of equal individuals. Arendt’s understanding of the political assumes that all humans can engage the public realm through speech-making (Dietz 1994, 249). That is, ‘speech and only speech [makes] sense’ and it is political action more than anything else (Arendt 1958, 25). This conception of ‘the political’ captures the emancipatory value of speech as interaction in plurality, in a ‘web of human relationships in which such interaction is actualised through speech’ (Arendt 1958, 178). Arendt’s conception of politics and political equality as collective action and engagement with peers in a public realm, encourages us to think about what it means to be speakers of words and doers of deeds (Dietz 1994).

Wolin drew on Arendt’s in developing his account of the political. One of his theoretical innovations was to represent the history of western political theory by clarifying the difference between ‘the political’ and other forms of association like ‘the social’ or the ‘economic’ (Wolin 2004). We get some clarity on what he meant when he wrote about events of the 1960s centring on student dissent.

According to Wolin, the ‘Berkeley Students for a Democratic Society’ revived ‘the political’ when they brought the political ideal of ‘participatory democracy’ to life (Wolin and Schaar 2001, 120). In effect, the ‘truly’ political is democracy. Wolin believed the political was concerned with what is common to a society, and it followed that democracy is a practice committed to common life, rather than legitimating the privileges of a few. This is why Wolin, like Arendt, holds that democracy leads a fugitive existence theoretically and practically and that too many political theorists have:

… bent their ingenuity to devising structures that would allow the few (whether kings, aristocrats, representatives, or bureaucratic officials) to use collective power for the good of all while exacting from the population at large the various contributions needed for that task. (Wolin 1994, 302).

Rancière (2010) elaborated this framing of the political to develop a concept of ‘politics’ that emphasises the capacity of speaking to disrupt a hierarchical order. Rancière begins by distinguishing between ‘policing’ and ‘politics’. As he explains:

there are [t]wo ways of counting the parts of the community  …  The first counts real parts only – actual groups defined by difference in birth, and by the different functions, places and interests that make up the social body on the exclusion of every supplement. The second, in addition to this, counts a part of those without part. I call the first the police and the second politics. (Rancière 2010, 34, Our stress).

‘Policing’ involves processes that define, count and distribute the positions of a social order in ways that enable some to exercise power, while designating those who are subject to that power. In most communities, he argues, a certain part of the populace is not accounted for, e.g. slaves, women and children. These are the ‘part who are not to have a part’.

Conversely, politics subverts the exercise of ‘policing’. For Rancière, political activities involve innovations that ‘tear bodies from their assigned places’ and free speech and expression from domination (Corcoran 2010, 1). Rancière sees ‘politics’ as disruptions that cut across ‘culture and identity, belonging and hierarchies between discourses and genres, working to introduce new subjects and heterogeneous objects into the field of perception’ (cited in Corcoran 2010, 2; Rancière 2010). For Rancière, ‘the political’ disrupts the conventional distribution of social spaces and power positions by making those who are ignored appear visible (2010).

The girls and young women in our research said very clearly that they are no longer prepared to be ‘that part’ who are deemed to be not entitled to take part in addressing the issue of global warming. They are calling for change, but do not have formal power because they are a ‘part that has no part’ (Rancière 2010). Yet they have become a public by taking matters into their own hands and through their speeches they call for action and make rallying calls to others to join them:

Because we suffer from a lack of democratic power, there are decisions being made that will directly impact the rest of our lives to a massive extent, and we’re not even being considered or consulted. (Jean Hinchcliffe, 16 years Transcript #42)

When we can’t vote, action is all that we have. (Jean Hinchcliffe, 15 years, Transcript #17, n.d.)

Conclusion

To date, few scholars have acknowledged or attempted to understand recent political interventions by young people and especially the leading role played by many girls and young women in Australian climate change politics since 2018. We engaged three questions to address a curated collection of recent speeches by girls and young women made during a series of School Strike 4 Climate in Australia. We asked whether we see in those speeches evidence of these girls and young women framing their speech-making in terms of a reflexively gendered or feminist perspective? We then asked if there was evidence of a reflexive understanding of ‘being political’ by these young speechmakers? Did these girls and young women see themselves as challenging this ‘natural’ or their ‘normalised’ exclusion? In response to each of the two questions, clear evidence was provided of how they operate with a reflexively gendered understanding of what they are saying and doing, and how they understand the politics of disruption.

Finally, we asked whether the girls and young women see themselves as challenging this ‘natural’ or their ‘normalised’ exclusion? We ask this last question mindful of a tradition of disruptive theory of ‘the political’ developed by Arendt (1958), Wolin (2004) and Rancière (2010). Rancière’s idea of ‘the political’ as disruptions which reveal the exclusion of those who aren’t normally allowed to take part seems especially pertinent. The speeches examined here reflect Arendt’s conception of politics as public speech, and demonstrate Rancière’s notion that ‘politics’ disrupts the established order in which some have a part while others do not.

While our conclusion is preliminary, what is happening seems to have broader implications for democratic practice which is generally acknowledged to be in trouble and in need of revision or repair. Young people, and especially girls and young women, are speaking truth to power, to their peers and to the wider community. They are creating space in the public sphere, challenging those who have for so long dominated the traditional practice of speech-making and the political. The distinctively gendered elements of this cannot be ignored. We hope this research offers a starting point that will hopefully encourage others to acknowledge and understand better the contribution these young women are making in reshaping politics.

Acknowledgement

In 2022, this research was partially supported financially by WSU, RMIT University, ANU, University of Sydney and then in 2023 it was funded by the Australia Research Council (DP230101704). Philippa Collin contributed to this publication while an Epiphany Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University in the UK. We acknowledge our research assistant Liz Ayers, Luigi di Martino and co-researchers in the ARC project: New Possibilities: Student Climate Action and Democratic Renewal Dr Michelle Catanzaro, Associate Professor Faith Gordon and Dr Stewart Jackson and thank them for their broader contribution to the intellectual work of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Collaborative funding: (WSU, RMIT, ANU, Uni Sydney).

Notes on contributors

Judith Bessant

Judith Bessant is a Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2017 for 'Significant service to education as a social scientist, advocate and academic specialising in youth studies research'. She writes in the fields of sociology, politics, youth studies, policy, media-technology studies and history. She also provides advise to government and non- government organizations.

Philippa Collin

Philippa Collin is Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia, where she co-directs the Young and Resilient Research Centre. She works at the intersections of youth studies, digital cultures, health promotion and political sociology and has published widely in these areas.

Rob Watts

Rob Watts is a Professor in the School of Global Urban and Social studies at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

Notes

1 Statement in speech by Greta Thunberg in 2021 at COP 26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ28YuEviKs.

2 Anonymised reference.

3 Reference to a reflexively gendered or feminist framing requires acknowledging the speakers own reflexive agency. Our interest in gender reflexivity draws on Bourdieu’s arguments about the value of reflexivity (1977), and Ward’s (2016) discussion of gender reflexivity in research. We adapted this approach to establish if there is an equivalent practice evident in the political action of climate activists. This entails recognising that the experiences of young women and girls, their motivations and reasons for engaging politically may differ from those of young and older men, and that these differences may be important for understanding contemporary social movements (Cossyleon and Wooley 2020). This involved us in establishing if the speakers made reference to gendered social practices and relations underpinning arrangements, cultural forms, or to the dominant ways of thinking or how decisions are made and how options are limited by those relations and practices.

4 We also acknowledge the paradox in drawing on Arendt to consider young people as political actors (e.g. Bessant 2021; Nakata 2007). Arendt disapproved of children assuming political responsibilities. Notwithstanding her account of young people engaging in politics, Arendt’s work points to the prospects of intergenerational synthesis of youthful energy and ‘aged wisdom’ energising political change.