Climate Action in an Eswatini Community: (Re)Storying Intergenerational Pedagogical Encounters

In this paper, I think-with narrative and visual stories that emerged from climate justice research with lands, children, families, elders, teachers, and a community-based agronomist in Nkambeni, Eswatini. The stories brought forward emerged from children’s land-based and classroom encounters with the effects of climate change in their community, from intergenerational dialogues on revitalizing Indigenous foods, and, also emerged as children, families and community members worked with the land to build an Indigenous food garden. I bring together (post)qualitative inquiry, Black method-making and Indigenous methodologies to orient me towards a particular kind of disruptive storytelling. This storytelling is anchored in ethical commitments that refuse the anti-Black, anthropocentric and Eurocentric developmentalism that can shroud even well-intentioned research that is enacted by Global North scholars in the Global Majority world. Importantly, a situated understanding of radical relationality is carried through the article as a concept that interconnects the stories shared of this research. Engaging with (post)qualitative inquiry in this paper also means that I work with a methodology of spatially and temporally diffractive storytelling. Alongside anti-colonial and Black method-making this (post)qualitative approach insists on the rigor of storytelling as method whilst thinking through carefully about what and how stories can be shared, inviting opacity as a generative way to research-with Indigenous and traditional communities, knowledges and lands. In addition to contributing knowledge on intergenerational, land-based and community-centered climate change education, the paper also aims to offer anti-colonial possibilities that are otherwise to anthropocentric and Eurocentric stories of African childhoods.