Since mid-2018, school students across the world have been leading mass strikes to demand strengthened political action on climate change. This article explores how young people’s political participation in the School Strike for Climate movement in Australia was represented in newspaper coverage over a 17-month period (August 2018–December 2019), with particular attention to the representation of young people’s emotions and actions. The analysis works with a corpus of 500 articles published in Australian national, state (New South Wales and Victoria), and a select sample of regional and rural newspapers. The corpus is read with affective-discursive attunement to historical representations of children and young people, the politics of emotion, and contemporary media representational politics surrounding climate justice activism. Four dominant characterisations of the young strikers are analysed: ignorant zealots, anxious pawns, rebellious truants, and extraordinary heroes. Alongside these characterisations, we consider how young people speak back to these characterisations, and draw implications for future research with young climate justice activists.

The conception of the child that a researcher holds has implications for research methods. This article adds to work that mobilises Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-child in Childhood Studies, exploring what their conceptual tools do to research methods and analysis. I map how puppet production emerged as a research method during an ethnography at a high school and how the students and I co-theorised the methodological value of puppet production. Exploring one particular puppet production, it is argued that puppet productions, analysed with young people, may open up conceptual possibilities, but must be examined alongside the dynamic conditions of their creation and analysis.

This article extends recent attempts to think (post)qualitative research together with decolonial, postcolonial and other critiques – as a frictional, fraught encounter. I review how the concept of voice has been used in past and present research with children and young people: from research speaking about children and young people, dialogical speaking with the ‘agentic’ young person, poststructural refusals of ‘raw voices’ speaking for themselves, and (post)qualitative onto-epistemological experiments with utterances spoken in research assemblages. Reading one of my research practices – the mis/use of cloth puppets with high school students – through recent critiques of (post)qualitative work, two particular concerns materialize: accounting for relations between past and present research, and accounting for what comes to matter during and after research encounters.

Student participation in school decision-making and reform processes has taken inspiration from reconceptualisations of childhood. Advocates for student voice argue for the repositioning of children and young people in relation to adults in schools. This article works with data from a multi-sited case study of three primary schools and students’, teachers’ and school leaders’ accounts of their student voice practices. We consider the relationships between students in student voice activities in primary schools, and the possibilities and ambivalences of representative students ‘speaking for’ other students. We integrate recent insights from moves beyond voice in childhood studies, and from the turn to listening in cultural studies, and raise questions for students, teachers and researchers who seek to encourage student voice in primary schooling.

The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded ‘knowledge economy optimism’. Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive constitution of academic subjectivity through the figuration of ‘emotional knots’ as we explore three stories of the constitution of academic subjectivities in institutional spaces. These stories were composed in a collective biography workshop, where participants constructed accounts of the physical, social, material and imaginative dimensions of subjectivities in the ‘academic-city’ of higher education spaces. Identifying moments of ‘perturbation’ in these stories, this paper considers the micro-contexts of ‘becoming academic’: how bodies, affects and relations become knotted in precise times and places. The figuration of ‘knots’ provides an analytical strategy for unravelling how subjects affectively invest in the promises of spaces saturated with knowledge economy discourses, and moments of impasse where these promises ring hollow. We examine the affective bargains made in order to flourish in the corporate university and identify spaces of possibility where optimistic projections of alternative futures might be formed. These stories and their analysis complicate the metanarrative of ‘knowledge economy optimism’ that is currently driving higher education reform in Australia.

A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (also known as Fridays for Futures and Youth Strike for Climate) has been the use of humour on cardboard signs, digital memes and social media posts. Young people’s cardboard signs, memes and social media posts have frequently mobilised humour as public pedagogy and political intervention – to emotionally stir and to politically engage others. In this article, we argue that the school strikers’ creation and mobilisation of humour demonstrate a critical affective climate justice literacy that educators committed to pursuing climate justice have much to learn from. In analysing examples of humour in contemporary student climate justice activism, this article brings previous analyses of the potential of humour in social movement studies and climate change communication into conversation with calls from environmental education scholars to pay greater attention to the potency of emotion for climate justice education, beyond a rationalistic focus on climate science literacy. We outline four pedagogical propositions for working with humour, accompanied by their own perplexities, in moving towards critical affective climate justice literacies.