Responsibilisation and ecological crisis: Recasting agency for Anthropocene times through child-parent encounters

This thesis examines how children and their parents come to know, be, and act in relation to ecological crisis as a dominant framing of contemporary human–nature relations. It explores how environmental subjectivities are shaped, negotiated, and unsettled through intergenerational encounters in spaces of environmental pedagogy and activism. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted at the Our Broken Planet exhibition at the Natural History Museum, the Festival of Thrift in Redcar, and The Big One climate protest in London, the study investigates how families experience, embody, and actively co-constitute environmental responsibility within affectively charged, more-than-human contexts.
Guided by Affect Theory and Common Worlds Scholarship, the thesis conceptualises environmental subjecthood as an ongoing, relational process of becoming rather than a fixed moral identity. It foregrounds the family as a crucial yet underexplored site in which ethical and political orientations toward the more-than-human world are cultivated and contested. Through attention to the micro-dynamics of parent–child interactions, the research reveals how affective intensities, embodied gestures, and fleeting moments of recognition and misrecognition generate opportunities to rethink environmental care and responsibility beyond neoliberal frameworks.

Four key arguments structure the thesis. First, the family is positioned as an important locus of environmental politics, where intergenerational encounters can unsettle dominant human–nature binaries and the responsibilised figure of individual agency. Second, children are understood as disruptive agents who reconfigure agency through their embodied and affective engagements, prompting adults to reimagine their ethical and political relations. Third, the thesis identifies ambivalence as a defining affect of contemporary environmental experience; embracing such ambivalence, rather than seeking resolution, enables more expansive and collective modes of response. Finally, it argues that heterotopic sites such as museums, festivals, and protests offer vital spaces for imagining and practising alternative, convivial forms of environmental politics.

The thesis contributes to scholarship on environmental subjectivity, geographies of the family, and the cultural geographies of environmental politics by advancing a relational and affective understanding of how environmental ethics emerge across generations. It calls for an expanded conception of environmental responsibility—one grounded not in individual virtue but in shared, situated, and uncertain processes of response-ability within the Anthropocene.