Electric Youth: Young People, Energy Infrastructures, and Power Cuts

Drawing on an interdisciplinary study that explored how large-scale regional, national, and supranational infrastructural crises are experienced, felt and lived with by young people, this article extends research and practice in energy geographies, sustainability, environmental education, and interdisciplinary childhood and youth studies through three interventions. First, we argue that many normative contemporary forms of energy studies, environmental education, and education for sustainability (EfS) could productively engage with children and young people’s everyday geographies. Second, we highlight the surprising absence of literal, embodied, affecting encounters with electricity and electrical infrastructures in contemporary practice and literature, which is ostensibly about environmental education and energy geographies. Third, we question the limited consideration of energy in interdisciplinary childhood and youth studies, despite the predicative importance of electrical infrastructures and technologies for many young people’s everyday geographies. We advance these themes through qualitative and quantitative data evidencing the prevalence of power cuts in many young people’s lives, and the multiple bodily and material ways in which frequent power cuts are noticed and lived with. We call for major bodies of work in energy studies, environmental education and EfS, and childhood and youth geographies to be brought into more sustained conversation.