Mark Ortiz is a scholar-activist and PPFP fellow in the Department of Geography at Penn State. He completed his PhD in Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2022. Broadly he is interested in transnational youth movements, the global politics of climate change, and youth popular and social media cultures. His doctoral research, funded by the National Science Foundation, characterized the pathways to institutional influence of emerging global youth climate movements such as the School Strikes for Climate and YOUNGO Youth network active in UN negotiations. During his postdoc, Mark is working to develop new storytelling approaches to better represent the geographical diversity of contemporary youth climate activism and elevating the stories of those young people on the frontlines of climate change often erased from mainstream narratives. He is a Leadership Team Member of the North Carolina Climate Justice Collective and has worked with numerous youth and intergenerational climate justice organizations including CliMates and the Climate Reality Project. He has also served as an expert panelist and consultant on topics related to youth empowerment for IDEO and the U.N. Foundation and served as a delegate to several UN climate change and sustainable development meetings around the world.
