Thinking With-and-By the Youth Climate Justice Policy Assemblage: A post qualitative approach to community engaged research
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Abstract: This article explores community engaged critical research (CECR) with youth climate activists and their adult facilitators to examine U.S. policy-making for transformative climate justice. Using post qualitative inquiry and thinking with new materialism, it presents a collaborative approach of building and analyzing assemblages (collections of more-than-human entities) to consider relationality and agency in complex systems. It explores how adults might act for climate justice in solidarity with young people and other entities that have historically been excluded by opening up a youth climate lobby day, thinking beyond current hierarchical approaches to policy-making to foster inclusivity, ethical solidarity, and dynamic intergenerational relationship.
Keywords: assemblage thinking, climate change, climate policy, climate policy lobbying, community engaged climate research (CECR), intergenerational climate justice, more-than-human climate justice, new materialism, post qualitative research, rhizoanalysis, transformative climate justice, youth climate activism
Community engaged critical research (CECR) offers an opportunity for ongoing work towards transformative climate justice, an approach that is inclusive, particularly of those that have historically been marginalized, draws upon diverse knowledge and worldviews, and strives to be healing and restorative for affected entities, communities, and systems (See, et al., 2024). This article presents CECR with youth activists and their adult facilitators as they organize for transformative climate justice in U.S. state policy-making, a system not designed to include young people or communities experiencing environmental injustice (hereafter referred to as EJ communities). I worked with these young people and adults amid the backdrop of a state-wide youth climate lobby event to explore the material-discursive practices, including social norms and politics, that affect and are affected by climate policy.
I began my research by reading within theoretical frameworks such as critical youth empowerment, which calls on adults to build relationships, share power equitably, and engage young people in decision-making at multiple socio-political levels (Jennings et al., 2006). I then expanded my review to include literature on intergenerational climate justice, which grappled with responsibility and ethical obligations for past, present, and future climate effects and action (Liou & Literat, 2020; Lund & Van Beers, 2020; Theodouro et al., 2023). Finally, I looked for ontologies to understand the Anthropocene and multispecies climate justice, realizing I needed to be open to reading across these theories and beyond because I was looking for the “in-between,” or the connecting elements – the relationality of a more-than-human (a term that includes humans and is inherently intergenerational) climate justice (Jackson & Mazzei, 2017; Kruger, 2022; Murris, 2020; Wolf, 2000).
But how might human community members be engaged in research that not only recognizes, as Bennett (2010) described, the “thing-power” of carbon and other material elements of climate change, but reconfigures climate justice to include all more-than-human matter? In thinking about how to engage human participants in critical research– specifically, post qualitative, new materialist inquiry on transformative climate justice policy– I considered the following “access points,” as referred to by Murris (2020), that are important for CECR under any paradigm:
the way more-than-human entities, relationality, and whole systems affect and are affected by a research phenomenon;
- the way participants are called upon to represent a community or to assign cause and effect to their emotions and experiences;
- the way choices are made about what to include or exclude from research and from a particular research study; and
- the ongoing accountability of the researcher to the community members engaged and the research phenomenon.
I began my work with young people and their adult facilitators by building an assemblage (a collection of things) from the event, and then used rhizoanalysis to trace connections between elements within the assemblage and identify potential for change. In the conclusion of this article, I revisit the access points to reflect on my approach to CECR and its potential implications for research and action on transformative climate justice policy with young people, EJ communities, and all more-than-human entities that have historically been excluded.
Study Origins
This research stems from my former work as a climate policy analyst and current work developing a sustainability program at a secondary school. In January 2024, I accompanied a busful of students to the State House to participate in a “lobby day” with the Massachusetts Youth Climate Coalition (MYCC), a group of young people (14-24 years old) representing EJ community organizations and school clubs from across the commonwealth. In addition to young people, there was a smaller number of adult facilitators that included adult coordinators from Our Climate, MYCC’s sponsoring organization, and chaperones from school groups. Youth leaders trained other young people to tell their stories of environmental injustice (hereafter referred to as EJ stories or just stories), present about specific bills, answer questions from policy-makers, and ask state senators and representatives to sponsor, endorse, and vote accordingly. The young people prepared for policy-makers who might derail lobby meetings and prevent young people from telling their stories and making their requests by assigning time-keepers and “legislator wranglers” to refocus lobby meetings.
The adult facilitators mostly stood to the side as young people led these trainings, marched, made speeches on the State House steps, and responded to questions from reporters. The adults helped maneuver the young people through security at the doors of the State House, and then oriented them on how to find legislative offices. Some adults joined lobby sessions as voting members of districts, but the young people led even these meetings with policy makers. I began wondering about the adult facilitators, many of whom were activists and had policy training and experience themselves, remaining uniformly present but mostly silent. A research study began forming: What might adult facilitation of youth climate justice activism help us understand about working towards transformative climate justice with other more-than-human entities that have historically been marginalized?
Research Approach
I adopted a post qualitative approach for this research to welcome diverse knowledges and worldviews and to allow myself to think across theories, allowing for, “indeterminacy, uncontain- ability, excess, flow, dynamics, multiplicity, and happenstance, [….and seeing] the future as radically open” (Taylor, 2017, p. 313). I wanted to be able to explore ideas freely with the youth climate activists and adult facilitators I was engaging, to be unbound by a particular methodology, and to honor the differences in perspective and experience we found. Reynolds (2014) refers to this as “messy inquiry,” and my notebooks and whiteboard, filled with circles, exclamation points, highlights, and arrows, matched this description.
I decided that my role as researcher would be to invite participants to build understanding with me. Rather than extracting and extrapolating, I would ask participants to share what they see and their experiences. I would refrain from asking participants to infer or attempt to deduce causality, noting that “what demystification uncovers is always something human, for example, the hidden quest for domination on the part of some humans over others, a human desire to deflect responsibility for harms done, or an unjust distribution of (human) power…. [tending to] screen from view the vitality of matter and to reduce political agency to human agency” (Bennett, 2010, preface XV). I hoped to shift the focus from “knowledge-making,” noting the impossibility of objectivity, recognizing that “situatedness and uncertainty” are part of an entangled more-than-human experience (Taylor, 2017, p. 4&5).
I engaged with four youth climate activists who planned and led the lobby day, a MYCC adult coordinator, and an educator who brought youth climate activists to the event. We met in combinations of only young people, young people and their adult facilitator, and only adults, recognizing that age-based and other power dynamics could affect what and when participants shared. In preparation for these meetings and to record my thinking before our co-constituting of new understandings, I engaged in the thinking I would later ask of participants and provide a record of it in my “findings.”
Thinking With-and-by Assemblages
Thinking with-and-by assemblages emphasizes the relationality of diverse elements, both the physically material, more-than-human entities and the immaterial ideas and discourse (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The concept demonstrates, “how much more complex the system of our entrapment is within and through discourse and discursive practices, but also through our bodies, and our bodies’ relations with other forms of life, through historical events and emotional commitments, and the repetitions that hold everything the same” (Davies, 2018, p. 119). Assemblages are described as horizontal, non-hierarchical, or linear, and the differences and divergences – the things that don’t line up – reveal power dynamics, other material-discursive practices, and possible transformative paths (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Jackson, 2003).
Before engaging participants in joint assemblage building, I began forming my own assemblage of the youth climate lobby day, leaving ellipses where young people and adult facilitators might make connections, or in-betweens, that I myself did not yet see. As I met with young people and their adult facilitators, I asked them to first record their own experiences and then to share aloud, allowing for back-and-forth and iteration with me and other youth activists and adult facilitators, before weaving all of our experiences into a new youth climate lobby day assemblage. Table 1 presents the assemblage I built before and after engaging youth climate

Table 1. Youth climate lobby day assemblages before and after engaging youth climate activists and their adult facilitators
In building an assemblage with the youth climate activists and adult facilitators, my original assemblage grew to include the marches, rallies and speeches outside the State House, the confusing floorplan of the State House that disperses the youth activists to meet with policy-makers over many floors and wings, and the accounting of success after the lobby day. I cleaved the yellow bus bringing us to the State House and the students and teachers left behind, not because I now wished to ignore them, but because I grew to see them as their own assemblage in need of consideration and transformation. With the youth climate activists and adult facilitators, my thinking about adults in the assemblage began to shift, moving them from a specific entity of the assemblage to the in-betweens. Where I originally saw adults giving up their own power and ambition in support of young people, I shifted to see them as connectors who might use their experience, knowledge, and adulthood to be an integral part of transformative change.
Seeing New Materialisms with Rhizoanalysis
There is an assumption inherent to seeing an assemblage: an ontology of new materialism that all matter has agency through dynamic relation with other matter, and that matter and its relationality is co-constitutive of social and cultural practices (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013, Bennett, 2010, Benson, 2019). Gough and Whitehouse (2020) described climate change as “quite possibly the ‘Mother’ of all materialities and made all the more frightening because how each and all of us will experience the effects will be a matter of uncertainty” (p. 1425). Verlie (2022) grappled with this embodied materiality in a paradigm that rejects hierarchical thinking, in particular when considering the differentiated way climate change and its impacts affect, “individuated and always locally and historically situated bodies” (p. 9). In stripping away hierarchy, however, new materialisms deal in relationality and transformation that might be possible by changing certain relational enactments, i.e., power dynamics, societal norms, political manifestations, and other material-discursive practices (Fox & Alldred, 2022; Gough and Whitehouse, 2020; Verlie, 2022).
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduced the concept of the rhizome and rhizoanalysis to help see these power dynamics and material-discursive practices in assemblages as possibilities for transformation (Jackson, 2003 & 2017; Reynolds, 2014). Rhizoanalysis is not a method but a way of thinking about the in-betweens of an assemblage (Reynolds, 2014; Sellers, 2015; St. Pierre, 2018 & 2021). Researchers might offer material examples of their rhizoanalysis in pictures, poetry, scripts, or other creative forms; in Figures 1 and 2, I present iterations of my rhizomatic thinking about relationality with-and-by the more-than-human entities in the youth climate lobby day assemblage built with youth climate activists and their adult facilitators.
I used the sketch in Figure 1 to think about two of the climate bills I witnessed youth climate activists discussing with policy makers – a climate justice education bill developed with young people, teachers and policy-makers and an energy infrastructure siting bill that was rewritten by legislators to exclude provisions agreed upon by a coalition of environmental justice organizations and community members (Kuznitz, 2024; Siefert Nunes, 2024). Youth leaders explained the history of these bills and chose young constituents to tell related EJ stories. Outside of the building, these policy histories and EJ stories were told to a large, cheering group of supporters, passers-by, and members of the press. Once inside, however, the group was splintered, navigating with the help of adult facilitators to offices of representatives and senators spread throughout the vast building. Even with the young people’s preparation, their stories and policy asks could be muted by policy-makers without the larger audience. One youth climate activist recalled that, while sharing their experience in a lobby meeting with a legislator from the same EJ community, they were interrupted and told a policy to improve indoor air quality in multi-family residences, schools, workplaces, and correctional facilities would never be viable.
Another young person described this as an opportunity for adult facilitators to help; they said:
Adults feel like they should stand back, just be there for liability reasons, but adults in mixed aged groups can bring their expertise and safeguard youth to talk about why an issue is important. It makes young people feel more confident to bring up an issue or part of a story and know an adult might be able to explain the policy relevance.
I understood that this was one young person’s experience and other young people might not agree, but it uncovered an assumption I had been making that adult solidarity with youth climate activists meant being present but remaining silent. An adult facilitator continued with a description of what {vocal, engaged} adult solidarity might look like:
The most important thing is holding hands with other people and not letting go, flexing adult power to disrupt other adult power…. and then, rather than adult activists and policy-makers extracting energy from youth meetings and then doing their own thing, taking accountability to continue including young people.
Figure 2 presents new connections and ideas for transformation in the assemblage based on these and other conversations with youth climate activists and adult facilitators. Rhizoanalysis is so named because a rhizome grows horizontally with energy stored in nodes that connect to each other by underground runners, from which aerial shoots emerge in seemingly haphazard locations (Reynolds, 2014). Most humans only see these shoots, if they see the rhizome at all, but they are just one part of a larger, heterogeneous system providing only a small hint at its spread and the entangled, relational system below (Jackson, 2003). In Figure 2, the roots are: land, air, water, and other more-than-human elements to be healed and restored; protection of some and exclusion of others from policy-making and government systems; and anger, fear, and hope. The shoots are EJ stories told openly through rallies and speeches and climate policies passed without ongoing accountability to entities that are and will be impacted. The bubble provides a shoot of possible transformation with adult facilitators helping young people tell their stories and build ongoing relationships between young people, EJ communities, other entities that have historically been excluded, and policy-makers.
A Return to the Beginning
I began this article by proposing that CECR might contribute to transformative climate justice and offering research access points. I return to these access points to reflect on my post qualitative thinking with youth climate activists and their adult facilitators. This inquiry broadened my understanding of the youth activist-adult dynamic, and led me to incorporate time as a research phenomena I had not yet considered. The rapid speed of the changing climate brought together young people concerned about the near future, and affected how young people and their adult facilitators might account differently for the success of lobby day, with some looking for immediate policy wins, others seeking to build relationships to bridge generations and political terms, and still others thinking about the long history of a government not built to serve all more-than-human entities. These differing experiences were expressed when participants were each asked to tell their experience without being tasked with explaining or attempting to demystify it. In building an assemblage and thinking rhizomatically with participants, I saw ideas meet, at times merging, fracturing, and transforming.
As I engaged youth climate activists and adult facilitators in this work, I was pulled to think about ongoing accountability, an idea that emerged in the research and through what felt like my responsibility for the thinking we did together. Reynolds (2014) referred to this for-and-with accountability as solidarity:
As an activist working and living in the rhizome of interconnected communities striving towards social justice, I wanted to approach inquiry in line with my ethics of solidarity and justice-doing. Solidarity speaks to our hopes and practices that move us towards our collective liberation, and the belief that our paths towards something just, are woven together (p. 132).
I plan to continue my work with youth climate activists as both a researcher and an adult facilitator of their activism, but I also note that in this article I invoke EJ communities and stories, as well as land, air, water, and other more-than-human entities affected by climate change. I am therefore called to also weave these entities into my ongoing work, and my own ethics of solidarity and justice-doing, as I consider how adult facilitators might help navigate long-standing systems for-and-with entities that have historically been excluded as we seek transformative climate justice.
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