Climate Crisis, Youth and Media: a story analysis of Geo-Doc videos as agents for social transformations

The last three decades have witnessed paradigmatic transformations in how youth engage in climate crisis advocacy practices. My thesis offers analysis of a United Nations-endorsed policy advocacy project, The Youth Climate Report (YCR). The project comprises short youth documentaries geo-positioned on a virtual map combined with an annual report submitted to United Nations Council of parties (COP) negotiations. Inspired by the project as an initiative of “Speaking Youth to Power” (Terry, 2024), my thesis seeks to better understand, celebrate, and contribute to this initiative and more broadly to youth climate crisis documentary multimedia.

Recognizing that climate crisis is in part a storytelling crisis and drawing on selected scholarship in media studies (McLuhan, Williams), youth studies (Hall, Castañeda, Foucault), and climate studies (Callison, Hulme, Solnit), I reflect on ways in which climate crisis and youth are framed and formed in stories bound up with social power relations.

I analyzed a sample of YCR Geo-Doc media documentaries—20% of those available, n=130—asking two questions: How do Geo-Doc videos story climate crisis? How do Geo-Doc videos story youth? My comparative analysis reveals four influential climate stories (Impacts, Humans, Resources, and Solutions) entangled with four stories of youth (as Witnesses, as Heroes, Inheritors and as Vulnerable).

My conclusion follows a political stance in which I interrogate these eight stories and alternatives and the extent to which they reproduce pre-existing stories with associated power relations thereby supporting the status quo and/or offer new ways that resist and challenge these. These discussions are more normative, seeking to identify youth climate crisis stories that are underrepresented and now urgently needed.