When Youth Scientists Disrupt the Riptide of Environmental Precarity: Lessons on Authoring Ecological Hope, Narrating Fieldwork and Designing for Ecojustice

Abstract

This dissertation features a set of three sub-studies situated within a larger Critical Participatory Ethnography investigating how participatory science unfolds between youth and scientists to address issues of marine plastic pollution. Collectively the papers provide insights into how to navigate the slippery, but necessary, terrain of teaching for environmental justice and worlds beyond the Anthropocene. Analysis of youth and community member interviews, photographs, audio recordings, and field logs revealed several important findings regarding how youth engaged and responded to learning about marine degradation and tensions and considerations of this type of science education. In the three cases of the focal girl participants, ecogrief and ecological hope are found to work in tandem to author new worlds that extend, repair or reimagine parts of their identities that have been, or are perceived to be at risk of being, severed. The findings reveal that the girls pulled on important and varied supports to author ecological hope. Additionally, iterative reflexive coding and retrospective analysis of data through a critical multilogics lens shaped by ontologies that disrupt “master narratives” also exposed methodological problems or shortcomings of the scientific work. These “conundrums” and “neglected narratives” necessitate pauses in learning and a new science practice I call “socio-ecological minding”. To extend these findings toward practicing science educators, I conclude the dissertation by presenting the Critical Community Science tool I had designed to design, evaluate and reflect upon the participatory science work unfolding with youth through the Plastics Project. Building upon experiences with guest science educators learning to apply the tool to their own work, I introduce different ways the tool was taken up and end by identifying areas of support for science educators wanting to attend to environmental justice.