ABSTRACT
Climate change has become, for many young people, a profound political and emotional concern. Since 2018, mass numbers of Australian school students have been walking out of school to protest against political climate inaction, known in Australia as School Strike 4 Climate (SS4C). This chapter analyses the varying responses of schools to the 2018–2019 school strikes, as represented across a corpus of 29 Australian national, state, and regional newspapers. We map a broad spectrum of school and school system reported responses to the strikes—from non-support with disciplinary consequences, to non-support for striking during the school week, to permission to support the strike on school grounds only, to parental discretion, to active support. Our analysis draws attention to an adjective frequently used to describe the student strikers: “passionate”—as it relates to the responses of schools and school systems to their actions. We consider this characterisation of the strikers as “passionate” in relation to Western philosophical associations of passion with women and children and the relegation of passion from the political sphere, and political theorist Chantal Mouffe's understanding of politics as passion. We argue that it is necessary to reconceptualise the citizenship status of children and young people and recognise the legitimacy of young people's political passions because of the inextricability of passions from the formation of young people's political consciousness in a rapidly warming world.
