Margaret Louise Tebbe

Children in California’s San Joaquin Valley, like children in many settings around the world, are growing up in landscapes dramatically shaped by climate change and environmental injustice. Their futures are increasingly uncertain as we outrun existing models of science and governance, but children still learn to know their environments and imagine their futures. This dissertation is designed to both understand how children’s knowledge is shaped by their volatile contexts and to support the development of new knowledge for a more just future. The project will engage high school students as co-researchers in an after-school “ethnography” lab where they learn to conduct research before teaching the same skills to younger students. Engaging students as co-researchers enables a secondary focus on understanding how participation in such collaborative ethnographic projects can transform children’s knowledge and worldviews. Thus, this research will produce both new understanding of children’s environmental knowledge, and new insight into ways ethnography can be used to study and cultivate this knowledge in different settings. It will build, amplify, and preserve the knowledge and voices of children in the San Joaquin Valley through creative use of diverse digital technologies to produce ethnographic writing, a community archive, and an environmental injustice case study.