Young people are trusting and championing science
By taking to the streets, youth across the globe have publicly and loudly shown a strong distrust toward our political representatives’ capacity and willingness to address the current climate crisis. However, besides their demand for politicians and the adult generation to “listen to the science”, we know very little about these environmentally active youths’ relation to and potential trust in science.
In her recent study, Karin Gustafsson explored how environmentally active youths relate to science in social media. She studied the Facebook posts of two large nongovernmental environmental youth organizations, Fridays for Future and Fältbiologerna, between 2019 and 2022, and what the discourse on science-public relations and youths’ trust in science looked like in these posts. The study gave an insight into young people’s relation to science and how they understand science’s role in the context of climate change, and with that, their own role in dealing with the climate crisis.
Read about the study in Karin’s blog post, linked here, or find the original article through this link.