Lucio De Capitani

Young adult speculative fiction as ecopedagogy: towards Green European citizenship

This research project aims to explore the eco-pedagogical and civic potential of Young Adult (YA) speculative fiction that tackles climate and environmental issues – understood as simultaneously social and political ones, and connected with dynamics of global power. Specifically, the project starts from the assumption that, if Europeanization is also an occasion to produce new critical responses to the climate crisis, literature should play a role in this process as a pedagogical tool to construct a Green European citizenship based on active participation, political awareness, and ecoliteracy, while also contesting the neoliberal rationale of mainstream environmental discourse. Speculative fiction, and YA fiction in particular, has long been acknowledged as a fertile terrain for political reflection for adolescents, often foregrounding their role as agents of change within uneven and unjust systems of power. At the same time, YA speculative fiction needs to be deployed critically for this potential to be fully activated. I aim to focus on a selected corpus of popular British and Anglophone YA novels belonging to various sub-genres of speculative fiction, reading them through the combined lenses of environmental/climate pedagogy, environmental literacy and citizenship studies, to evaluate their (different) potential in terms of fostering environmental literacy and green (European) citizenship.