[s]ây project by rêu collective

rêu collective is a collective of aspiring Vietnamese peers with diverse backgrounds and skill sets. We come together to recognize and amplify marginalized Vietnamese youth voices on climate justice and eco-anxiety, hoping to co-create pluriversal, caring, and just futures.

Context

A study led by one of the founders of rêu collective highlights a substantial level of awareness and involvement in collective climate action in Vietnam, a country highly vulnerable to climate change. Specifically, 76.4% of participants expressed familiarity with these initiatives. However, these initiatives focus on interventions rather than advocating for radical systemic change. Our recent study on the future imagination of Vietnamese youth highlights a recurring envision for 2040, depicting a developed society with a degraded environment, as a result of Western ideology, colonialism, extractivism, and capitalism. This study also emphasises the challenges faced by the youth, who, despite their active participation in climate change initiatives, express concerns and feelings of being overwhelmed due to a lack of knowledge and empowerment. Adding to this challenge is the influence of a dominant and partly manipulated narrative from the West, reinforcing a colonial viewpoint. Notably, the lens through which climate change is perceived in Vietnam lacks intersectional and decolonial perspectives. In response to these findings, our collective aims to facilitate peer-learning spaces for Vietnamese youth and Vietnamese marginalized communities.

We want to recognize and amplify:

1) unheard voices in climate discourse,

2) local knowledge in climate adaptation, and

3) pluriversality of possible hopeful futures.

Our topic for [s]ây project focuses on situated knowledge and just futures through the lenses of Vietnamese youths and marginalized communities such as ethnic minorities and the LGBTQIA+ community.

We aim to answer together three main questions:

1) how climate change impacts disproportionately affect them;

2) how traditional or indigenous knowledge has been used and/or can be used to support communities in climate adaptation; and

3) what just futures look like to them.

To explore these questions in our inclusive peer-learning space, collective knowledge-sharing, and collective imagination methods will be explored and implemented. Specifically, we will organize a series of online workshops consisting of two sub-series: the first one centers on local knowledge-sharing and sensemaking of Climate change, Climate justice, and Climate adaptation, and the second one explores different collective imagination practices as a way to co-create detailed depiction of pluriversal just futures. As a result, a collection of local and traditional knowledge, stories, and futures will be shared with international audiences through an online archive and potentially with local audiences through a physical exhibition in Hanoi depending on our resources. The goal of sharing this collection is to further amplify the marginalized voices and local knowledge and to invite audiences to join the co-creation of these futures together with workshop participants.