Anna Hickey-Moody, 'Carbon Generation'

This is an ETLab Methods session.

'Generation Z' are the first community to grow up in ways shaped by the intersection of individual lifestyles and global carbon emissions. They are a generation of young people who know themselves in terms of their carbon footprint and they are a generation whose pleasures and careers are explicitly tied to various forms of carbon generation. As consumers, young people now evaluate their choices and behaviours in attempts to impact or ignore the unstoppable tide of climate change. Historically, this is a cultural change in terms of what it means to be human. Carbon consciousness is now part of everyday life. It is also a defining feature of the subjectivity of Generation Alpha. This talk offers a new theory of youth culture through examining young people today (Alpha and Z) as 'carbon generations': young people who are defined by an understanding of their carbon footprint. At the same time, I consider the carbon-heavy pleasures of gaming, blockchain, AI and digital cultures that have become so central to contemporary youth cultures and employment industries. Young people today both generate more carbon emissions than any other humans previously, and they are also understanding themselves in terms of these practices in new ways.  Material inscriptions of social class, language, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality all feature in the diversity of youth carbon cultures, and inform young people's everyday attachments to carbon. In particular, young people's carbon-heavy mobility choices often involve distinctive aesthetic styles and sensibilities (Stefanoff & Frederick, 2011), and are bound up with varying affective investments in belonging, differentiation, self-expression, pleasure, vitality, hope, and overall, a shared sense of ongoingness and what it takes to' get by' (Berlant, 2011). In many cases, Western environmentalist discourses both threaten and exclude subjectivities which de­rive a strong sense of cultural meaning and value from carbon-heavy activities, including popular youth investments in custom car and dirt bike cultures both within and beyond the urban centres.

The methods for data collection employed include ethnographic observation, digital animation workshops and one on one interviews.

Anna Hickey-Moody is the Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Maynooth University in Kildare, Ireland and the Inaugural Senior Academic Leadership Ireland Professor of Intersectional Humanities. In this role she is responsible for developing and communicating financial plans and strategic vision, building community infrastructure and advocating for research in Arts and Humanities. The talk today comes out of Anna's project JET: Just Energy Transitions for Disadvantaged Youth and her long-standing empirical work in the Latrobe valley and ex mining towns.