Nordic Geographers Meeting 2024
Nordic Geographers Meeting 2024
We attended the 10th Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM), organized by the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management of the University of Copenhagen, to present our project. The Nordic Geographers Meeting is a biannual, international conference encouraging dialogue on research in geography and how this can further our understanding of societal and environment challenges. This year’s conference focused on ‘Transitioning Geographies’, referring to the overwhelming changes taking place in the conditions for human existence around the world and how we can navigate them more justly.
Our panel was organized by Katherine Gough from Loughborough University and Thilde Langevang from Copenhagen Business School. It focused on ‘Intergenerational relations: cooperation and conflict in challenging times’ and examined how social, economic, environmental and technological changes in the world alter relationships between younger and older generations. A broad range of issues were discussed, including the role of residential segregation, migration, art, and the mass extinction of species.
Our own contribution to the panel focused on ‘Global Imaginaries, Intergenerational Relations and Youth Mobilization in Times of Climage Change’. We addressed the problem of how the ‘blame’ for and impacts of climate change across different generations are represented by International, Tanzanian and Danish online media, and what purpose such global imaginaries can serve. One product of these imaginaries is the idea of a global generation of youth coming together across global divides to solve climate challenges. We asked whether we can meaningfully speak of an existing ‘global generation of youth’, and how youth actually relate locally, in different parts of the world, to solving worldwide challenges.
This investigation into global imaginaries and intergenerational relations in times of climate change forms part of our research project ‘Universal Aspirations vs. Geopolitical Divides: Imagining the World as a “Post-Millennial” in the SDG Era’ The project addresses how young people who are concerned with finding solutions to global challenges but live in disparate parts of the world under very different conditions, specifically in Tanzanian and Denmark, reconcile the tensions between universal aspirations for sustainable development and their local life conditions.