For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt's sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult ...generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt's use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt's situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt's neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt's authority depends on a dichotomy between the private (education, the child) and the public sphere (politics, the adult). This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt's feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future (time), world and earth (space), and the private and public sphere (relation). This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority.
This article studies discursive formations of climate change in texts by the contemporary climate activist movement’s most famous character, Greta Thunberg. This study critically analyses the Greta ...Thunberg message and discusses the kind of worlds her message evokes. In doing so, the author discusses what is being included in and omitted from contemporary public understandings of climate change. Three themes are identified and analysed in the Greta Thunberg message: science as truth; for the sake of the human child; and the apocalyptic futures and the evocation of the past. It is argued that the Greta Thunberg message makes sense because of how it resonates with a worldview related to the promises of modernity. Furthermore, one way of understanding the popularity of Thunberg’s message is that it evokes dreams of a world that once was. It is suggested that the Greta Thunberg message evokes longing for the past, rather than the possibility of existing in an already changing climate.
Anti-feminists, anti-environmentalists, and ableists use memes of activist Greta Thunberg, especially representations of her face, to angrily depict her as irrational and a monster. Participants in ...these interlinked groups create straw versions of feminist activists and distinguish men's purported rational development of civilisation from emotional girls, women, and nature. Individuals perform such contemptuous operations, as I argue throughout this article, by misrepresenting Thunberg's climate and feminist platform and shifting the debate from her environmental advocacy to her embodiment and emotions. I closely read these texts and employ academic literature on anti-feminisms, straw arguments, and straw feminisms to suggest how anti-feminists render simplified figurations. Given my consideration of how anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, and ableist positions are enmeshed in dismissing Thunberg's activism and physiognomy, I also outline environmental scholarship that addresses gender and disability studies literature on Asperger syndrome and enfreakment. These are complicated critical gestures, but they are necessary since the over 3,000 memes that I studied, and the associated politics, function by simultaneously dismissing girls, women, feminism, the environment, and people with disabilities. Such an analysis of online texts is pressing since anti-feminisms are designed to disqualify feminist thinking about oppression and the vitality of feminist dialogues with related political movements.
Although there is a developing strand of literature on young people’s participation in environmental activism, there have been few systematic comparisons of their participation in different forms of ...environmental activism. This article compares the participation of young people and their older counterparts in climate change marches and Global Climate Strikes (GCSs). The agential and structural factors that draw people into protest participation are, in general terms, well recognized. However, it is also recognized that the factors that lead to particular types of protest on certain issues might not be the same as those that lead to different types of protest on different issues. In this article, we keep the protest issue constant (climate change), and make comparisons across different forms of climate protest (marches and school strikes). We coin the term “mobilization availability”, which is a useful way to understand why young people are differentially mobilized into different types of climate change protest. Our notion of mobilization availability invites scholars to consider the importance of the interplay of the supply and demand for protest in understanding who protests and why. We analyse data collected using standardized protest survey methodology (
n
= 643). In order to account for response rate bias, which is an acute problem when studying young people’s protest survey responses, we weighted the data using propensity score adjustments. We find that the youth-oriented supply of protest evoked by GCS mobilized higher numbers of young people into climate protest than did the more adult-dominated climate marches. GCS did this by providing accessible forms of protest, which reduced the degree of structural availability required to encourage young people to protest on the streets, and by emotionally engaging them. Indeed, the young people we surveyed at the GCSs were considerably more angry than their adult counterparts, and also angrier than young people on other climate protests. Our conceptual and empirical innovations make this paper an important contribution to the literature on young people’s political participation.
Hyperconnected societies offer new opportunities for the role of the individual voice. A deregulated world of information poses a paradox, however, in which fake news might conceivably underpin the ...political agenda more than informed research. The sheer amount of information available forces publics and audience members to seek shortcuts to knowledge through access to preferred academic, public intellectual or 'thought leader' perspectives. Drawing upon theories of deliberative democracy and open communication, this paper critiques the roles of academic, public intellectual and thought leader to move beyond discussion of the value of individual voices in the sharing of knowledge. It suggests that both public intellectuals and thought leaders illuminate how the individual voice makes an important contribution in providing continuity when open communication of research is disrupted by unruly speakers and publics.
Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are critical pieces of climate change communication. #FridaysForFuture (FFF) is one of the movements with the most coverage. This paper analyzes ...the network structure generated in Twitter by the interactions created by its users about the 23 September 2022 demonstrations, locates the most relevant users in the conversation based on multiple measures of intermediation and centrality of Social Network Analysis (SNA), identifies the most important topics of conversation regarding the #FridaysForFuture movement, and checks if the use of audio-visual content or links associated with the messages have a direct influence on the engagement. The NodeXL pro program was used for data collection and the different structures were represented using the Social Network Analysis method (SNA). Thanks to this methodology, the most relevant centrality measures were calculated: eigenvector centrality, betweenness centrality as relative measures, and the levels of indegree and outdegree as absolute measures. The network generated by the hashtag #FridaysforFuture consisted of a total of 12,136 users, who interacted on a total of 37,007 occasions. The type of action on the Twitter social network was distributed in five categories: 16,420 retweets, 14,866 mentions in retweets, 3151 mentions, 1584 tweets, and 986 replies. It is concluded that the number of communities is large and geographically distributed around the world, and the most successful accounts are so because of their relevance to those communities; the action of bots is tangible and is not demonized by the platform; some users can achieve virality without being influencers; the three languages that stood out are English, French, and German; and climate activism generates more engagement from users than the usual Twitter engagement average.
In this paper we take as our starting point Greta Thunberg's message to an audience of adults at a recent climate change summit: 'This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school ...on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!' We take Thunberg at her word and endeavour to investigate what is wrong and how it might be wrong. Through this investigation we consider how education may be implicated in the problem to which Thunberg alludes: a problem about both climate change and intergenerational change. We draw upon Hannah Arendt's seminal work, 'A Crisis in Education', to consider how an ecological crisis coincides with an educational crisis symptomatic of an inversion of the traditional adult and child relationship in which education serves to introduce the young to the world - a public world, which is distinct from the ecological world. Arendt's position on education, we argue, reveals concerns that movements like School Strike for Climate expose young people prematurely to the risks of indoctrination that attend adult, public life, and hinders their renewal of the world. Science too may add to these risks.
The guilt and shame of participating in an indecent consumerist way of life that causes climate change and mass extinction of species inflicts a moral wound on us. This moral wound arouses an ...indignation of which the "Greta generation" is one of the spokespeople, and it involves developing an ethic of relations between our species and non-human species. We must learn to "think like a mountain", in the words of Aldo Leopold, that is to say in an ecosystemic way, in order to accept our true place in the biotic community of microorganisms, flora and fauna: that of "children of the biosphere", a biosphere on which we are as dependent as an infant is its parents. The author argues that developing such an ethic requires a work of culture to think about new environmental paradigms, especially the fact that humanity endlessly artificializes nature, even its own nature, to the detriment of the wild part of them. Can the Œdipal situation, its taboos and its respect for fecundity be extended to our biotic family?
In this article, the author begins by grasping the present crisis through the social anthropological description of
overheating
. She then locates “Generation Z (Gen Z)” as a generation born into an ...overheated era and distinguishes their socio-political struggle for intergenerational climate justice from preceding generations. Following that, the author presents an analysis of the oppressive adultist dimensions of the challenges confronted by Gen Z activists like Greta Thunberg. She does so by engaging with examples from the German context. The objective of the discussion on adultism faced by Gen Z activists consequently establishes that young activists demonstrate relentless courage and hence their contribution deserves a legitimate place in rethinking socio-political “education.” Her reading reveals that young activists are simultaneously resisting adult opposition and contributing to educating older generations about the intergenerational dimensions of the climate crisis. Therefrom, the author proposes that one may re-think the matter at hand from a childist standpoint which implies a re-cognition of pupils' agency within education i.e., intergenerational relating, as something that adults can also learn from. She suggests that an integral dimension of reflexivity in further developing childist educational theory and praxis, entails a conscious commitment to
letting
children and youth teach adult educators too.
Este artículo analiza la representación mediática de los movimientos juveniles frente al cambio climático tomando como referencia sus principales organizaciones: Fridays for Future y Extinction ...Rebellion. Se parte de un análisis de contenido de 262 piezas informativas publicadas en el período álgido de las movilizaciones de 2019 en cuatro periódicos españoles online de referencia: El País, Eldiario.es, ABC y La Vanguardia. Los resultados demuestran que los medios autodenominados progresistas ofrecen una actitud más favorable hacia las movilizaciones, en especial, al abordar Fridays for Future, mientras que los conservadores se mueven entre una posición de neutralidad y oposición, menos benevolente en el caso de Extinction Rebellion. Si bien los periódicos ofrecen una visión contextualizada y apoyada en el relato de los activistas, la representación de las protestas tiende a un tratamiento algo sensacionalista y más centrado en el conflicto que en su agenda política: en el caso de Fridays for Future, se tiende a una personalización exótica en la figura de Greta Thunberg, de la que raramente se anuncian sus propuestas, mientras que en el de Extinction Rebellion se retratan de forma anecdótica algunas de sus performances no violentas.
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