Youth arts pedagogy for climate justice: radical relationality and interspecies poiesis in a yet-to-be-known world

In this climate-changed reality, where young people regularly experience devastating floods, extreme temperatures, and species extinctions, the Anthropocene child is called to act as the earth's and humanity's protector. This article seeks to understand how children and youth are reimagining hierarchical relationships between child-adult and human-nature binaries in climate-responsive projects and programs. We provide a contextual framing of youth activism and frustrations in realizing climate justice; describe four case studies from Australia, New Zealand, and the United States focused on radical relationality with stream, forest, fish, and birds; and analyze how these cases connect with the concepts of inventive agency, radical relationality and interspecies poiesis. We find that inventive agency not only disrupts harmful dichotomies but also invites open dialogue, develops action competencies, and builds on Indigenous principles of reciprocity and relationality. The fluidity of the process and in many ways the literal embodiment of river, forest, birds, and fish, enable interspecies poiesis, or the emergence of something new. While many framings of climate justice center on equity and action, the cases presented here convey how a distinctive interspecies poiesis serves to reconfigure emotions and reconstruct possibilities as relational visions for a yet-to-be-known world.