Presentation short abstract

We present Critical Climate Education as a political ecology research agenda focusing on critically examining discourses, agency, and affect in educational struggles over climate justice, grounded in cases from Norway, Catalonia and Colombia, and aligned with calls for critical climate education.

Presentation long abstract

Building on calls to interrogate how schooling reproduces or contests socio-environmental inequalities (Meek & Lloro-Bidart, 2017; Rahm & Brandt, 2016) and echoing arguments for critical climate education as central to fast and just transitions (Svarstad et al., 2023), this presentation advances a research programme that situates education within climate justice struggles. We examine how schooling sustains dominant socio-ecological orders while also hosting counter-practices capable of positioning students and educators as historical actors (Gutiérrez et al., 2019).

The programme articulates three lines. First, a critical discourse analytical strand traces how school policies and practices generate depoliticising imaginaries and responsibilisation narratives rather than relational, justice-oriented citizenship (Hultberg, Jornet & Sæther, in progress). Second, drawing on cultural-historical work on agency and voice (Jornet & Rajala, 2025), we investigate pedagogies that position youth and educators as actors actively reworking socio-ecological relations. Third, we reconceptualise affect as collectively produced, historically situated and materially consequential—examining how relations such as hope, anxiety and care are woven into institutional life, shaping agency and the reproduction of unjust socio-ecological orders (Røkenes & Jornet, 2025; Guarrasi & Jornet, 2025).

These strands are grounded in empirical cases: a Norwegian school’s enactment of policies casting students as “change makers”; teachers in Catalonia resisting housing dispossession affecting students, illustrating education as urban environmental justice struggle; and post-conflict Colombian peace-building confronting extractivism, insecurity and contested territorial futures. Together, the programme conceptualises schooling as a political-ecological terrain in which discourse, socio-material conditions and affective configurations shape capacities for climate justice.