Seed money call: Youth as agent of sustainable change
Utrecht University’s strategic themes Dynamics of Youth and Pathways to Sustainability are launching a call for excellent proposals to be awarded joint seed money funding from both strategic themes together. With this seed money call Dynamics of Youth and Pathways to Sustainability call upon you to help understand the dynamics of youth as agent of change. What role can youth play in finding pathways to sustainability? We hope to further research trying to understand the new action repertoire, the new cultural dynamics including lifestyle change, the intergenerational dynamics it results in.
We are witnessing the sudden (re-)emergence of activism calling for a response to the stream of negative news about the rate of human-induced environmental change. Young people play a pivotal role in this. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg started ‘the school strike for the climate’ and has ignited ‘climate marches’ taken up worldwide. Extinction Rebellion takes to the street in a call for prompt action to halt the rapid loss over species, projected to concern over a million species over the next decades related to global warming. While older generations often take part in these new initiatives it is young people that act here as ‘agent of change’.
In this new dynamics sustainability gets redefined. It is no longer about reaching the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, it is about addressing the ‘climate emergency’. Similarly, we witness new cultural-political expressions of concern, addressing not only the political leadership but raising (intergenerational) questions within families, schools, cities, neighbourhoods as well.
The joint seed money call aims to support research projects bridging the two strategic themes in the form of collaboration of colleagues from different faculties and research disciplines.
The deadline for applications is set on 2 November 2020.