Flooding Youth Futures: Australian and Indonesian climate change adaptation stories

The lack of freely available contemporary youth-centered language curriculum is a problem for for Australian tertiary Indonesian language programs.

The University of Queensland and BINUS University in Jakarta have secured an Australia Indonesia Institute grant, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trading, for the project Flooding youth futures: Australian and Indonesian climate change adaptation stories.

David Hill, Liam Prince and Howard Manns, among many others, identify a lack of freely available contemporary youth-centred language curriculum as one problem for Australian tertiary Indonesian language programs.

This project will create such material through a collaboration between Australian and Indonesian academics and students, and urban youth.

Focus will be on youths’ experiences of climate change adaptation to flooding events because the research base, media reporting, and government accounts typically exclude youth stories of their everyday adaptation strategies and experience of these increasingly frequent disasters.

To address this lack of voice, this project uses a participatory collaborative approach that will enable youth to audio-visually record their stories about rain-induced flooding in Brisbane and tidal-induced flooding in Kendal and have them heard via the creation of a YouTube channel, seminars, social media, and curriculum materials. All audio-visual material will be in Indonesian (with English subtitles).