Climate Anxiety as Anticolonial Activism

Abstract There is now an abundance of literature pointing to the relationship between the escalating global impacts of climate change and the adverse effects of irreversible ecological destruction on the emotional worlds of children and young people. Contextualised to Manitoba, Canada, this article is positioned as a call for a more relationally accountable and response-able engagement with climate change and (child/youth) emotions, supporting curricular and pedagogical enactments in (western) education to grapple more ethically with social and ecological threats and injustices of these times. Through an anticolonial and posthumanist self-study in collaboration with a middle-years classroom, this article experiments with climate anxiety as anticolonial activism. Such a move seeks to generate different types of relations with Indigenous peoples, Land, and multispecies kin; and (re)imagine curricular and pedagogical enactments that usher open-ended, ambiguous, and indefinite engagement with the emotional politics of settler-colonialism.