Young People, Thinking Technologies and Stories of/for the Anthropocence

In a recent blog on The Sociological Review Magazine, we outline a case for developing a sociological imagination for the Anthropocene. We suggested that: A sociological imagination for the Anthropocene must find innovative, productive and critical ways to move beyond the anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism and methodological individualism that underpins the more conventional sense of a …

Blah, Blah, Blah: Young People, the Climate Crisis, Hope and the ‘Dithering’ of Adults

image credit In a recent article in The Guardian, Damian Carrington (2021) presents a number of extracts from a speech by Greta Thunberg to the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday September 28, 2021 – a speech that was timed in relation to the upcoming COP 26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. Greta’s targets in the speech are political, business and …

Young People as Biocultural Creatures: Re-imagining Sociologies of Young People’s Well-being

With my colleagues Seth Brown and James Goring I am developing a chapter  – Being young’, ‘living well’, in/beyond the pandemic: Exploring the entanglements between COVID-19, the Anthropocene and young people’s wellbeing – for an edited collection to be published in 2022 titled, Wellbeing: Global Policies and Perspectives Using the stories of three young people – Michael, Ruth and …

What is a death worth? A life? The Moral Economy of COVID-19

Gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage…It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads…Yet gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of …

COVID-19 and the Problem of Generations

Authors: Peter Kelly, James Goring, Meave Noonan. Every afternoon the Australian Government Department of Health issues an updated infographic that provides a snapshot of the state-of-play of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. The image above is from May 9. It shows a number of things, including that recorded infections indicate that COVID-19 cases are fairly evenly spread …

COVID-19 and Young People’s Sustainable Futures: Worst Case Scenarios?

Futures and Scenario Planning Any glance into the future is necessarily tied to imponderables; there is always more than one possible development path – because there is so much that simply cannot be foreseen and because the future will also be shaped by decisions that we still have to be taken. Today, context is changing …