I am a Visiting Scholar in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group led by Prof. Sarah Franklin. I am interested in how children, both real and imagined, are positioned in the political project of addressing climate change and how social actions around climate change affect ideas about children. I received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison where my dissertation asked, what does it look like to politicize “the child” in climate activism? I studied how movements such as “BirthStrike” explicitly positioned the decision to not have children as a political response to climate change, calling on people to strike from childbearing and rearing. I also examined the transnational school strikes for climate that began in 2018, organized and carried out by youth activists. By focusing on the mutually constitutive ideas of “child” and “climate crisis,” I aim to enrich the narratives of climate change, question core assumptions, and re-frame children and the reproductive discourses through which they are often defined.
