Voicing the Eco-Political Agencies of Children Through Participatory Creative Methods

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Youth climate activists are receiving unprecedented media attention. In increasingly visible ways, young people like Greta Thunberg, Jamie Margolin and Isra Hirsi are reacting to and confronting ecological conditions and futures. Yet there is an urgent need to complement our attention to these youth leaders in the Global North with better understanding of the political agency of children in the midst of the climate crisis in the Global South. As development studies literatures affirm, it is vital to engage with children in Global South cities who are negotiating complex climate change issues and pressures on a daily basis. However, as recent work in children's geographies suggests, approaches to children's agency should include attention to the multiple, often non-verbal modes in which children express themselves. The proposed project responds to these challenges by developing participatory methods to engage with Global South, urban-dwelling primary school children to document their concerns and ideas about local environments and the impact of climate change. More specifically, I will investigate children's agencies in relation to climate change through participatory methods featuring music and sound. I will do so by staging a series of musical and vocal workshops with seven to eleven-year-old children in Bogota, Colombia. Building on my existing professional practice as a facilitator of musical workshops and learning spaces for primary school children in London, as well as my experience working with communities in Latin America, I will evolve two sonic methods: first, I will employ the histories and tonalities of Cumbia music (a musical genre that originated in Colombia) as a means to involve children in mapping stories and issues of the environment and climate change; second, I will facilitate vocal exercises and improvisation sessions to encourage children to invent their own space of communication and exchange. By engaging with children in Bogota, where I have access to space and resources through educational contacts, this project will further understandings of children's political agencies and local environmental concerns. It will also engage inherited traditions of music and sound in the Global South, while decentring western perspectives on children and climate change. Bringing together children's geographies, studies of political agency in the Global South and participatory creative methods, this project will make an important contribution to literature on children's political subjectivities in the midst of the climate crisis.