Call for Manuscripts, Study & Scrutiny, Volume 8

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: DECEMBER 15, 2025

CLIMATE, JUSTICE, AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: CENTERING INTERDISCIPLINARY CLIMATE LITERACY LEARNING

All around us, small and large changes herald the effects of a warming world: earlier planting times, shifting animal migration patterns, and torrential rains followed by long periods of drought. Much of our human infrastructure is not built for the severity of weather that results from global warming. Simultaneously, elected leaders and corporate interests continue to argue about the severity of human-caused climate change and the extent to which, if at all, we should move away from reliance on extractive petrocapitalism. How might we go about choosing YAL to provoke interdisciplinary inquiry into the shared climate challenges we face? What is the responsibility of ELA teachers to select YAL that supports environmental education towards sustainability? This special issue of Study and Scrutiny: Research in Young Adult Literature invites educators and scholars to contend with the ways young adult literature presents the hopes, challenges, and ways forward in addressing our multi-faceted climate crisis. As humanities teachers the literature we choose to bring into the classroom has power. The texts we forward for shared reading serve as starting places for the conversations in which young people give words to their ideas, investigate and experiment in their communities, face constructive challenge from peers, and seek evidence to support their beliefs. Consider:

• What can YAL teach us about indigenous ways of knowing and caring for our shared planet, non-human creatures and plants, and the systems that provision life?
• How do characters in climate fiction novels grapple with manifestations of different aspects of the climate crisis?
• What does youth action and agency look and sound like in YAL?
• What explicit and implicit messages permeate YA climate-related nonfiction (e.g., Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference) and multimodal texts and graphic novels (e.g., Nausicaä anime series)? How might we engage our students in analyzing these messages?

Writing in Empowering Youth to Confront the Climate Crisis in English Language Arts (Webb, Beach, & Share, 2024), Marek Oziewicz & Nick Kleese challenge ELA teachers to consider their role as pivotal leaders in supporting young people to claim their power in addressing climate challenges. They write:

“the generation(s) that will come of age in the 2020s and 2030s are likely to face the full brunt of the unfolding climate catastrophe. They will also be the last generations capable of containing the destruction…to transform our extractive, ecocidal global civilization into a regenerative, just, ecological one. The hope in young people’s future power animates much of climate scholarship. How do we unleash that power? How do we prepare young people to be agents of this unprecedented transformation?” (p. 15).

If teachers are to “lead the climate literacy revolution” (Oziewicz, 2024; Oziewicz & Kleese, 2024, p. 15) then our preparation includes deep knowledge of texts that will inspire the inquiry, innovation, and energy youth will need to address our collective crisis.

• Which novels have inspired climate literacy and environmental justice conversations and action in your classroom?
• Which texts support literary analysis that takes up the critical lenses of eco-criticism (e.g., Curry, 2013; Dobrin and Kidd, 2004; Glotfelty & Fromm, 1996) ecofeminism (e.g., Curry, 2010; Fawcett, 2000; Gaard, 2009, 2015), climate literacy (e.g., the CLICK framework, Oziewicz, 2023), and environmental justice (e.g., Bullard, 1993; Nixon, 2011)?
• Which texts serve as strong foundations that lead students into the pedagogies of place-based inquiry and youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008)?

Scholars Lindgren Leavenworth & Manni (2021) and Herb (2024) argue that speculative climate fiction can offer a safe space for young readers to engage the environmental problems of climate change in ways that provoke re-thinking about ways of living more sustainably.

• Which cli-fi texts have engaged your students and why?
• How can we use literature as a tool for deep and collaborative engagement with the moral and ethical questions of sustainable living on a finite planet?

We encourage submissions such as pedagogical essays connected to young adult literature and describing transformative classroom practices that actively engage learners in climate literacy and perhaps the investigation of local community challenges. We also encourage critical essays and empirical research studies that deeply examine young adult literature, single texts or curated text sets, using a critical theoretical framework(s) to guide the analysis. We are especially interested in articles that offer a compelling argument for the use of young adult literature as a springboard for youth activism, hope, and innovation in response to our ongoing climate crisis and that connect climate literacy to global issues, the well-being non-human flora and fauna, collective engagement, and civic responsibility.

REFERENCES FOR EXPLORATION

Beach, R., Share, J., & Webb, A. (2017). Teaching climate change to adolescents: Reading, writing, and making a difference. Routledge.

Bullard, R. (Ed.). (1993). Confronting environmental racism: Voices from the grassroots. South End Press.

Center for Climate Literacy at the University of Minnesota, Climate Literacy in Education Journal

Curry, A. (2013). Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave.

Damico, J. S., & Panos, A. (2018). Civic media literacy as 21st century source work: Future social studies teachers examine web sources about climate change. The Journal of Social Studies Research, 42(4), 345-359.

Damico, J. S., Baildon, M., & Panos, A. (2020). Climate justice literacy: Stories‐we‐live‐by, ecolinguistics, and classroom practice. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(6), 683-691.

Dobrin, S. I., & Kidd, K. B. (Eds.). (2004). Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Dupigny‐Giroux, L. A. L. (2010). Exploring the challenges of climate science literacy: Lessons from students, teachers and lifelong learners. Geography Compass, 4(9), 12031217.

Echterling, C. (2024). Fostering environmental justice, climate justice and collective action through children's and young adult literature. In Engaging with Environmental Education through the Language Arts (pp. 34-48). Routledge.

Fawcett. L. (2000). Ethical Imagining: Ecofeminist Possibilities and Environmental Learning. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 5: 134–149.

Gaard. G. (2009). Children’s Environmental Literature: From Ecocriticism to Ecopedagogy. Neohelicon 36 (2): 321–334. doi:10.1007/s11059-009-0003-7.

Gaard. G. (2015). Ecofeminism and Climate Change.  Women’s Studies International Forum 49: 20–33. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2015.02.004.

Glotfelty, C., & Fromm, H. (1996). The Ecocriticism Reader. University of Georgia Press.

Grünthal, S., Lahtinen, T., & Pihkala, P. (2025). Literature and Reading as Ways to Engage With Climate Anxiety in Classrooms. In Addressing Climate Anxiety in Schools (pp. 158-178). Routledge.

Herb, A. (2024). ‘Everywhere’s Burning’: Realising Climate Change and Activism Through Bushfires in Australian Young Adult Literature. The International Journal of Young Adult Literature, 5(1).

Kershen, J. E. (2024) Exploring the complexities of environmental disaster, justice, and racism in Ninth Ward (Chap. 1). In K. Hinton & K. Chandler (Eds.), Teaching Black Speculative Fiction (pp. 1-15). Routledge.

Kershen, J. E. (2024). Climate Literacy Opportunities and Critique in Paradise on Fire by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Children's Literature in Education, 1-16.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Lei, L. (2021). Exploring ecological identity from the perspective of systemic functional  

linguistics. Journal of World Languages, 7(3), 487–514. https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2021-0013  

Lindgren Leavenworth, M., & Manni, A. (2021). Climate fiction and young learners’ thoughts—a dialogue between literature and education. Environmental Education Research, 27(5), 727-742.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

Oziewicz, M., & Saguisag, L. (2021). Introduction: Children's Literature and Climate Change. The Lion and the Unicorn, 45(2), v-xiv.

Oziewicz, M. (2022). Planetarianism now: On anticipatory imagination, young people’s literature, and hope for the planet. In Pedagogy in the Anthropocene: re-wilding education for a new Earth (pp. 241-256). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Oziewicz, M. (2023). The CLICK framework: A care-centric conceptual map for organizing climate literacy pedagogy. Climate Literacy in Education, 1(2), 44-50.

Oziewicz, M., & Kleese, N. (2024). Teaching With Climate Literacy Capabilities and Knowledges. In Webb, A., Beach, R., & Share, J. (2024),  Empowering Youth to Confront the Climate Crisis in English Language Arts, Teachers College Press.

Panos, A., & Damico, J. (2021). Less than one percent is not enough: How leading literacy  

organizations engaged with climate change from 2008 to 2019. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 17(1), 2–21. 

Panos, A., & Sherry, M. B. (2023). Storying climate change: Discursive possibilities for teaching climate justice literacies. In Critical perspectives on global literacies (pp. 124-139). Routledge.

Panos, A., Geren, K. V., Hull, K., & Sherry, M. (2024). “Stories are our survival guides”: Ecojustice literacies in politically and ecologically vulnerable places. Curriculum Inquiry, 54(4), 349-376.

Rybak, K. (2023). Towards a literature of actions: Green informational picturebooks and critical engagement with fighting climate change. Children's Literature in Education, 1-15.

Stowe, C. (2020). Adolescent Activism: Teaching Experiential Literacy with Young Adult Literature and Global Perspectives. Virginia English Journal, 69(2).

Thunberg, Greta. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. Penguin, 2020. United Nations. (n.d.). Youth in action. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/youth-in-action

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2009). Climate literacy: The essential principles of climate science. https://www.globalchange.gov/reports/climate-literacy-essential-principl...