Animating the Material Politics of the Anthropocene

Digital qualitative (Waltorp 2018, Fullager et al 2017, Horst 2015) and sensory methods (Coleman, 2021, 2020) offer practical ways to understand the embodied and experiential nature of young people's subjectivities and affinities. Drawing on digital animation workshops I ran with young people in coal mining areas, in this paper I examine how they experience belonging and attachment in the Anthropocene. Understanding attachments allows research to move beyond an individual’s relationship to their immediate environment to think about a wider range of experiential, embodied and emotional ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Neilson 2008). This paper builds on recent advances in affect studies, applying ideas and practices from this work to new contexts: the digital animation workshop in coal mining towns. I analyse my data via a conception of identity as a material and emplaced assemblage of affects that is created through human and non-human relationships, and this is an ideal way to approach the study of young people's systems of value in mining economies. Belonging, identity and value are not singular or static. They are iteratively produced through struggle and action, brought into being through multi-scaled acts and assemblages. Both consciously and unconsciously, carbon economies are embedded in the multi-scaled, iterative production of subjectivity. Considering carbon production and consumption as acts of youth citizenship, I develop new ideas about how the material politics of citizenship in mining communities are comprised.