ESRC Grant awarded to SCI Research Associate

The grant was awarded for the project ‘Young people at a crossroads: Negotiations of environmental knowledges, practices and subjectivities in immigrant homes at a time of climate crisis’

Catherine Walker will be returning to SCI and the Politics department to take up her award in January 2021 and will be mentored by Dr Sherilyn MacGregor (SCI/Politics) and Dr Natascha Klocker at University of Wollongong, Australia, with Professor Lesley Head, University of Melbourne as a Co-Investigator on the project.

Data collection for the project will be conducted in Manchester and Melbourne, and the project will employ a part-time Research Assistant in Melbourne. Whilst undertaking the New Investigators project, Catherine will also have a small role on the Leverhulme-funded project led by Sherilyn MacGregor, ‘Environmental Sustainability in Immigrant Households’.

Abstract

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 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.