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The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive list of student‐led, campus‐based climate change initiatives, and offers details on many specific cases. The paper also documents the roles students have played and considers the larger youth engagement implications. Many of these initiatives can be replicated elsewhere, thereby providing a starting point for students wanting to begin an initiative or providing ideas for other campus stakeholders wanting to engage students in initiatives.

Campus reports were collected by the Sierra Youth Coalition from 65 Canadian Universities and Colleges. This qualitative information was coded for student‐led climate‐related initiatives, and for the roles students played in those initiatives. The patterns were identified and clustered, and are presented in this paper.

Students were found to be successfully leading eight different types of campus climate change‐related initiatives, both with the support of other campus stakeholders and without this support. Students were also found to be able to successfully take on a variety of types of leadership roles in these initiatives. Youth engagement ranged from socialization to influence to power, depending on the type of initiative.

A limitation of this research is that only 65 of the approximately 227 colleges and universities in Canada participated. Also, it is possible that some schools may not have reported all student‐led initiatives, or all the student roles. In addition, the data were limited to the 2007/2008 academic year, so is limited to the initiatives which occurred in that year.

This paper presents different types of student‐led climate change initiatives, the roles students have played in these initiatives, and the implications for youth engagement in creating climate change solutions. It contributes to the climate change, the campus sustainability, and the social movements literatures.

This paper aims to trace how emotion shapes the sense that is made of politics and how politicization can remake and re-mark emotion, giving it new meaning in context. This paper brings together theories of politicization and emotional configurations in learning to interrogate the role emotion plays in the learning of social justice activists.

Drawing on sociocultural learning perspectives, the paper traces politicization processes across the youth climate movement (using video-based interaction analysis) and the animal rights movement (using ethnographic interviews and participant observation).

Emotional configurations significantly impacted activists’ politicization in terms of what was learned conceptually, the kinds of practices – including emotional practices – that were taken up collectively, the epistemologies that framed social justice work, and the identities that were made salient in collective action. In turn, politicization reshaped how social justice activists made sense of emotion in the course of activist practice.

This study is valuable for theorizing social justice learning, so social movement facilitators and educators might design spaces where learning about gender, racialization, colonialism and/or human/more-than-human relations can thrive. By attending to emotional configurations, this study can help facilitate a design that supports and sustains learning for justice.

Emotion remains under-theorized and under-analyzed in the learning sciences, despite indications that emotion enables and constrains particular learning opportunities. This paper proposes new ways of understanding emotion and politicization as co-constitutive processes for learning scientists interested in politics and social justice.