Greta Thunberg’s meteoric rise from lonely school striker in August 2018 to global icon is one of the most remarkable political phenomena in recent decades, and one full of paradoxes. Thunberg ...started out with no resources, a child of 15 with limited experience and a history of Asperger’s. Thunberg’s iconic performance seems to have been able to turn these weaknesses into strengths. To understand how this happened, we must situate her analysis within the social media ecology. Two things distinguish this environment from previous phases: iconic protagonists now have wide degrees of control over their own performance, and audiences are no longer mere receptors of iconic performance, but active co-performers. Greta Thunberg is one of the first major political icons to have been fully formed within the new social media ecology. This article provides the first systematic analysis of this dynamic.
•Empirical research with 64 climate strikers in six cities in four different countries.•Examines knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions of climate strikers.•Large variation in climate strikers ...regards to knowledge, emotions, motivations and actions.•Strikes provide opportunism also for other social and political action.•Values underpinning climate action range from individual to planetary concerns.
In August 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started to strike from school on Fridays to protest against a lack of action on the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a historically large youth movement, leading to a series of school strikes across the world. Over the course of one week in September 2019, striking school children, students and other grassroots movements, such as Extinction Rebellion, called for everyone to participate in a global Climate Strike. This paper is based on comparative research with climate protesters in six cities: Brighton and London (United Kingdom), Montreal (Canada), New Haven and New York (USA), and Stavanger (Norway). Based on original interviews with 64 protesters, the study examines their knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions in relation to climate change, including any lifestyle changes they have undertaken before or after their protests. Our findings show that protesters have varying degrees of knowledge about climate change, and have taken a range of actions in their own lives to address climate change. They also manifest a wide spectrum of emotions about climate change, and different motivations for taking part in climate strikes. These features are under-studied and dynamically evolving at the present conjuncture. On this basis, we call for expanded academic attention to human, emotional, epistemic, and seemingly mundane aspects of climate protests, their structural tendencies and relational expressions, and the implications for our ability to address underlying drivers.
In this paper, the domination of the youth climate movement by the use of derogatory ageist language in German newspapers is uncovered. We find that German newspapers use different ageist media ...images, including 'pupils', 'absentees' and 'dreamers', to de-legitimize the FridaysForFuture movement. Greta Thunberg is presented as a 'young hero', who is held responsible for youngsters' absenteeism. FAZ and taz present a paternalist discourse in which the central narrative is that the young climate activists are pupils who are ignorant and still need to learn; and who are obliged by law to go to school. We argue that German newspapers align with the exclusive hegemony of an established environmental governance regime that struggles with the problematic phasing out of coal in Germany. Instead, a common practice of reluctancy and skepticism appears inherited in conservative discussions on climate action led by FAZ and the so-called coal commission.
This article is interested in populism outside the master frame of institutional politics (populist parties/leaders), considering, instead, the populist potential of celebrities’ everyday politics on ...social media. To understand this potential, the article suggests, we need to understand how celebrities are compelled by today’s mediatized communicative ecosystem to perform themselves as ordinary advocates for people-victims. We need to examine how the performative logic that this ecosystem forces into platforms accommodates certain emotional claims to ordinariness and normative-moral claims to advocacy—who is (un)worthy of a place in the victimized people that celebrities should advocate for. The article does so by analyzing two paradigmatically different case studies: Lady Gaga’s legacy-status and Greta Thunberg’s influencer-style performances of celebrity advocacy on Instagram. The analytical discussion leads to contemplating the mediatized populist politics of everyday politics that both perform, despite their differences, and its ambivalent relationship with liberal democracy (centrist moderation and neoliberal consolidation).
This article engages with the particular fragility of liberal democracy in current times. The particularity at stake here concerns the two major challenges that liberal democracy faces today, notably ...the rising allure of fascism (mostly AF hereafter) and the rise of climate politics (mostly CP hereafter). The article is not concerned with the external threats that fascism and climate politics pose for liberal democratic law. It engages with the way that any endeavour to deal with these threats threatens liberal democracy with the internal self-destruction of its essential ideals and principles.
Nesta resenha sobre “O livro do clima”, criado e coescrito pela ativista sueca Greta Thunberg, fundadora do movimento Fridays for Future, faz-se uma reflexão sobre a relevância da obra para a ...comunicação climática nos anos recentes. Trata-se de um livro com capítulos escritos por dezenas de autores de diversas nacionalidades, cada um deles falando sobre suas vivências em relação à crise climática ou suas contribuições para o avanço de seu debate. A obra pode ser entendida como um retrato da governança ambiental global contemporânea, por reunir os dados mais atualizados até o momento sobre a mudança do clima, e discute paradigmas em ascensão como transição energética, justiça ambiental e a legalidade por trás da questão dos refugiados ambientais. O que fazer com “O livro do clima” é uma provocação para a sensibilização e a empatia das sociedades contemporâneas, tendo em vista a importância de ações individuais para a produção de bens coletivos.
Nesta resenha sobre “O livro do clima”, criado e coescrito pela ativista sueca Greta Thunberg, fundadora do movimento Fridays for Future, faz-se uma reflexão sobre a relevância da obra para a ...comunicação climática nos anos recentes. Trata-se de um livro com capítulos escritos por dezenas de autores de diversas nacionalidades, cada um deles falando sobre suas vivências em relação à crise climática ou suas contribuições para o avanço de seu debate. A obra pode ser entendida como um retrato da governança ambiental global contemporânea, por reunir os dados mais atualizados até o momento sobre a mudança do clima, e discute paradigmas em ascensão como transição energética, justiça ambiental e a legalidade por trás da questão dos refugiados ambientais. O que fazer com “O livro do clima” é uma provocação para a sensibilização e a empatia das sociedades contemporâneas, tendo em vista a importância de ações individuais para a produção de bens coletivos.
Nesta resenha sobre “O livro do clima”, criado e coescrito pela ativista sueca Greta Thunberg, fundadora do movimento Fridays for Future, faz-se uma reflexão sobre a relevância da obra para a ...comunicação climática nos anos recentes. Trata-se de um livro com capítulos escritos por dezenas de autores de diversas nacionalidades, cada um deles falando sobre suas vivências em relação à crise climática ou suas contribuições para o avanço de seu debate. A obra pode ser entendida como um retrato da governança ambiental global contemporânea, por reunir os dados mais atualizados até o momento sobre a mudança do clima, e discute paradigmas em ascensão como transição energética, justiça ambiental e a legalidade por trás da questão dos refugiados ambientais. O que fazer com “O livro do clima” é uma provocação para a sensibilização e a empatia das sociedades contemporâneas, tendo em vista a importância de ações individuais para a produção de bens coletivos.
If not Thunberg, perhaps Trump? A study about the relationship between skepticism towards society and attitudes towards global political symbols This article concerns how publics relate to global ...political actors, including: Joe Biden, Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In an increasingly globalized and digitized era, the influence of political actors increasingly transcends national boundaries, turning them into global celebrities and in this case also global political symbols. In order to explore the growing importance of global political symbols for political behaviour, this article seeks to explore the association between opinions towards several global political symbols, broadly representing either the establishment or the anti-establishment, and attitudes towards the media, politics, science, global warming and the Covid-19-pandemic. Using survey data collected in Finland 2021, the results broadly show that holding positive opinions about establishment symbols are positively associated with holding mainstream opinions, while a similar relationship is found between anti-establishment symbols and populist attitudes. The findings add to the literature about the attitudinal foundations of emerging global political mass movements.
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