Engaging young people with the climate emergency through literature.

deadline for submissions: 
October 30, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
University of Gloucestershire / University of Minnesota
contact email: 

We are seeking chapters for an edited book with the provisional title: Engaging young people with the climate emergency through literature. We are currently working with Bristol University Press to get this project off the ground.

Literature for young people has, from the mid twentieth century to the present period, increasingly engaged with the theme of environmental strife and trauma. Primary texts in this regard range from Virginia Gross’s story of the Johnstown Flood, The Day It Rained Forever (1993), to Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust (2005), to the more recent young-adult novel by Sarah Guillory, Nowhere Better Than Here (2022). A recurring recent theme in such texts has been the climate crisis and its fallout in terms of amplifying divisions and perennial social issues that exist in our societies, including poverty, race and class.

Our book will take the form of an edited collection blending close readings of primary texts with ways educators can engage young people with their messages to develop climate literacy. Increasing environmental awareness among young people, in addition to developing their empathy in relation to how disenfranchised communities are particularly affected by the climate emergency is, we believe, a crucial aspect of 21st century citizenry and as such, worthy of exploration in book-length form.

The theme of climate change will factor into an array of chapters with a pedagogical underpinning, authored by various researchers and educators in this field and drawing on authentic texts that range from young-adult and middle-grade fiction, to non-fiction sources and graphic works. This research, in addition to contributing to the contemporary corpus of ‘climate lit-crit’, will also proffer an original, timely and invaluable resource for educators. The originality stems from the topic itself, added to the fact that few existing volumes blend literary critical with pedagogical concerns in this field.

If you are interested in contributing a chapter, please send a 300 word abstract and 100 word bio to bscreech@glos.ac.uk and klees023@umn.edu by 30th October 2024.