Unseen, unfelt, unknown: Encounters, inexpressiveness, and young people’s engagement with planetary crises

Young people are increasingly considered crucial political actors in addressing planetary crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss, and much hope is invested in young subjects who are affected and moved towards active engagement and response. Against this backdrop, this article explores how young people encounter planetary crises as unseen, unfelt and unknown. In these more subdued and ambivalent encounters, planetary crises do not come into full presence, and the affects they evoke point in unclear directions or orient the subject towards seemingly nothing at all. Based on a four-year longitudinal interview study, the article develops an empirically grounded conceptual framework of ‘inexpressive planetary encounters’ that encompasses their ontological and epistemological dimensions, as well as their implications for knowledge and engagement. The article contributes to a sociology of young people and planetary crises by demonstrating how inexpressiveness as a mode of encounter with planetary crises loosens the grip of contemporary demands about how engagement and response ought to be performed. Without suggesting that inexpressiveness is always or unambivalently political, the article explores its openings for other forms of engagement. In doing so, it seeks to broaden political possibilities for what constitutes engagement and response in the face of planetary crises.