#743: How Transnational Youth Make Sense of Multiscalar Citizenship Towards Climate Justice

This study investigates how transnational youth make sense of climate change across personal, local, and global contexts. Drawing upon critical participatory design-based methods, we bear witness to how youths’ embodied experiences, including transnational identity and cultural, ecological, and geopolitical positioning, become onto-epistemological resources for climate sense-making. Through a case study, we illustrate how one youth connected scientific climate knowledge to war experiences, framing war as climate catastrophe encompassing increased carbon footprints and ecological devastation, displacement, cultural erosion, and trauma. Youth draw on their vulnerability to deepen understanding of climate causes and consequences, while fostering empathy-driven solidarity and advocacy. They amplify silenced voices and call for collective responsibility in confronting intertwined climate and geopolitical injustices. Youth’s multiscalar experiences constitute legitimate knowledge that expands and critiques dominant climate narratives, offering onto-epistemological testimony that reframes climate justice scholarship and pedagogy.