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With the emergence of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, youth climate activism has attracted increasing attention. Climate strikes are part of a long trajectory of mobilizations for climate justice, rooted in global justice and environmental struggles. Although research on social movements has analyzed differences and continuities within these, there have been few systematic comparisons between youth climate strikes and 'traditional' climate justice marches. Our paper contributes to fill this gap. We focus on the framing of climate change in two different protest actions that took place in Milan, Italy, during the Pre-COP26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2021: a climate strike by Fridays for Future, and a 'traditional' climate justice march by a wide coalition of actors. Relying on protest surveys and qualitative interviews, we discuss differences, similarities, and spaces for convergence among activists in these different fora, focusing on the framing of climate change, and on the meanings attached to 'system change'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, after decades of attempting to raise awareness of the need to take action, the climate movement saw a surge in its ability to mobilize citizens and influence the political agenda. A younger generation leading the movement has given renewed vigour to the movement's discourse by emphasising the need to act immediately by expressing the idea of emergency. This article suggests that this notion, one that is central to the current youth climate movement, includes an acceleration of time and a discourse based on hope. These ideas have worked as an activator of action complementing or nuancing narratives about future and climate change. The analysis of the discourse of Fridays For Future Barcelona on social media (Twitter and Instagram) with a mixed methods approach shows first the centrality of the notion of emergency in the public discourse of the movement and its role in making the future seem not so distant. Secondly, it shows how the use of emergency speech is linked to a positive view of the future and to a generational discourse. And, finally, it has been detected that using emergency speech together with references to a hopeful future increases the impact of the movement's social media posts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In succession of climate change and the associated concerns about the future of the planet, a global climate movement has been developing since 2018, following the initiative of Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg. Alongside Fridays for Future, which use demonstrations to encourage politicians to act quickly, more radical groups have also formed, hoping to achieve more success through high-profile provocations. In Germany, the Letzte Generation is one of these groups. The climate movement is characterised by a strong interest in apocalyptic rhetoric and symbolism. On the one hand, this article will compare the historical youth movement of the first third of the 20th century with the Letzte Generation. It will show that youth protest movements are particularly open to apocalyptic motifs. On the other hand, it will highlight the challenges for religious education, because secular apocalypticism, which lacks important aspects of its Judeo-Christian origin, can be not uncomplicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzed the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement and its online mobilization around the Global Day of Climate Action on 25 September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this event is a unique opportunity to study digital activism as marchers were considered not appropriate. Using Twitter's API with keywords "#climateStrike", and "#FridaysForFuture", we collected 111,844 unique tweets and retweets from 47,892 unique users. We used two typologies based on social media activism and framing literature to understand the main function of tweets (information opinion, mobilization, and blame) and their framing (diagnosis, prognosis, and motivational). We also analyzed its relationship and tested its automated classification potential. To do so we manually coded a randomly selected sample of 950 tweets that were used as input for the automated classification process (SVM algorithm with balancing classification techniques). We found that the automated classification of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to not increase the mobilization function of tweets, as the frequencies of mobilization tweets were low. We also found a balanced diversity of framing tasks, with an important number of tweets that envisaged solutions to legislation and policy changes. COVID-related tweets were less frequently prognostically framed. We found that both typologies were not independent. Tweets with a blaming function tended to be framed in a prognostic way and therefore were related to possible solutions. The automated data classification model performed well, especially across social function typology and the "other" category. This indicated that these tools could help researchers working with social media data to process the information across categories that are currently mainly processed manually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pandemic conditions have affected social movement activity in various ways. In this article, we explore how young Cypriot climate activists, associated with the global Fridays for Future movement, attempt to integrate pandemic conditions in their mobilizing tactics, as well as how such conditions affect their collective youth agency. We first look into the strategic antagonistic framings they develop to counter dominant discourses of the pandemic as an unprecedented crisis and explore how these are informed by their understandings of, and emotions on, climate change as an effect of capitalism and overconsumption and as a type of 'slow pandemic'. We argue that by extending climate change crisis discourse to encompass the cause of the pandemic, young activists assert temporality as continuity, rather than rupture, and challenge the distinction between the exceptional and the everyday on which Emergency governance is based on. By doing this, they unsettle adult hegemonic discourses on temporality, emergency and crisis that lead to an uneven world. Secondly, we reflect on the impact of Covid-19 on non-institutional youth activism by exploring the challenges these activists face to their sustenance and reproduction, given that access to public space, as we claim, is crucial for teenagers in developing the necessary relationality that is key for the maintenance of their social movement activity. We argue that youth movements emerge and operate within particular conditions which are currently under threat given the distinct mechanisms of governing populations engineered during Covid-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg began a school strike that quickly spread across the globe. After a ritual strike every Friday by school pupils to call for urgent action against climate change had gone on for several months, what had become Fridays for Future (FFF) called for various global days of action throughout 2019, bringing millions of people out onto the streets in the largest climate protests in world history. Drawing on unique protest survey data on FFF events across European cities in 2019, this article explores the structural bases of organized collective mobilization for climate justice. Nuancing narratives that focus on either the privileged background of climate justice protesters or the environmentalism of the poor, our results show the heterogeneity of the social composition of the protests, suggesting the need for cross-class alliances for mass mobilizations. Moreover, our analysis reveals that the social background of protesters shaped their attitudes regarding what institutions and approaches can be relied upon to tackle climate and environmental challenges. This suggests an important and under-studied connection between social background and the strategic choices of environmental movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzed the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement and its online mobilization around the Global Day of Climate Action on 25 September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this event is a unique opportunity to study digital activism as marchers were considered not appropriate. Using Twitter’s API with keywords “#climateStrike”, and “#FridaysForFuture”, we collected 111,844 unique tweets and retweets from 47,892 unique users. We used two typologies based on social media activism and framing literature to understand the main function of tweets (information opinion, mobilization, and blame) and their framing (diagnosis, prognosis, and motivational). We also analyzed its relationship and tested its automated classification potential. To do so we manually coded a randomly selected sample of 950 tweets that were used as input for the automated classification process (SVM algorithm with balancing classification techniques). We found that the automated classification of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to not increase the mobilization function of tweets, as the frequencies of mobilization tweets were low. We also found a balanced diversity of framing tasks, with an important number of tweets that envisaged solutions to legislation and policy changes. COVID-related tweets were less frequently prognostically framed. We found that both typologies were not independent. Tweets with a blaming function tended to be framed in a prognostic way and therefore were related to possible solutions. The automated data classification model performed well, especially across social function typology and the “other” category. This indicated that these tools could help researchers working with social media data to process the information across categories that are currently mainly processed manually.

Since August 2018, Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future have captured the attention of the world by mobilizing millions of young students as well as adults to join their climate strikes. The movement has stressed the urgency of global warming and urged politicians to listen to science and take action. The collective action framing has thus been broad and inclusive, but correspondingly vague in terms of its demands. It is therefore pertinent to explore what climate strikers believe should be done to address climate change. By analysing responses to an open survey question posed to participants in the climate strikes in March and September 2019 from Stockholm, Malmö, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Florence and Brussels, this article uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate prognostic framing in the European climate movement. Distinguishing between two dimensions of projected change—its character and its main agents—this study re-conceptualizes the common distinction between institutionalist and anti-institutionalist approaches as a split between top-down and bottom-up as well as the system change and system development types of prognostic framing. While top-down change within the current system is identified as the most common prognostic frame, considerable numbers of survey respondents instead stress individual lifestyle changes. A bottom-up change of the system to address global warming is somewhat surprisingly more likely to be articulated by middle-aged respondents than by youths. The latter frame also receives disproportionate support from the most left-leaning participants, which demonstrates the continued relevance of the left–right dimension in green politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latest wave of climate change activism, affects and time are everywhere. Most recent works have focused on these dimensions separately, the intersection between time and affectivity underexplored. This author argues that focusing on affects and emotions is crucial to understand the political implications of the temporal narratives drawn by climate activists in a way that complements the politicization vs. depoliticization binary in this context. To document the political labor performed by affects and emotions, the article discusses three aspects of the affective temporalities mobilized by Fridays for Future and Youth for Climate activists: the political potential of affective tipping points which trigger moments that "draw a line" and bring together the temporalities of mobilization and geological change; the politicizing effect of painful emotions, such as anticipatory nostalgia and grief, which challenge the "modern arrow of time"; and the constitutive power of these emotions in the construction of a terrestrial affective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," this article discusses how new climate movements try to break with the empty time of conventional climate discourses in order to politicize the "now." Pointing at the catastrophe looming on the horizon, new climate movements question understandings of history as progress. These are underpinned by linear, gradual, and homogeneous conceptions of time, as present in a wide range of future climate pathways characterized by moveable deadlines and a strong reliance on future promises. Embracing, at least rhetorically, a full conception of time, for instance, in their call to declare a climate emergency, new climate movements claim that the struggle cannot be postponed until tomorrow. One has to act "now." Paradoxically, however, to create this sense of full time, the movements rely on the empty time of, for instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate scenarios and the image of the climate clock. The performative call to "act now" entails, therefore, its own contradictions. When every now moment can be staged as the decisive moment, time is paradoxically made empty again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current climate crisis, young people are portrayed paradoxically: victims and stakeholders, political protagonists and school truants. Based on ethnographic research with the climate movement, this article explores how youths manage their activism as it interfaces with their socialisation contexts, tracing prevalent adult antagonisms: radicalism, condescension and individualism. Drawing on sociological conceptualisations of climate precariousness and on an educational theorisation of subjectification, I argue that activists construct margins of resistance in their everyday political practices by incorporating processes that interrupt adult structures while reframing educational imagination. This highlights how the individual present is colonised by the risks posed to a collective future, leading adult power to be contested at a collective-public level (through performative reconfigurations of existing orders) and subverted at an individual-private level (by repurposing privileges towards climate struggle). Resistances to adultism uncover competing notions of future and education as integral to politicisation processes within the climate movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how the Fridays for Future movement (FfF) attempts to reframe climate change as a climate crisis. Adding to the research on the role of climate change communication for inducing behavioural change, we analyse the way in which this reframing is conducted and locally negotiated by FfF groups in Germany and Estonia. The paper thus focuses on the question of how FfF's global blueprint for a climate strike, which builds on the notion of crisis, is transferred into different societal contexts. Aided by multisite ethnographies, similarities and differences in reframing and protest strategies and the negotiation of the local reception of this message are elaborated by referencing the example of FfF groups in Berlin and Frankfurt (Germany), as well as Tallinn, Tartu and Pärnu (Estonia). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of climate injustice and a socio-critical, psychoanalytical perspective associate the climate crisis with other forms of social injustice classifying these as 'social pathologies'. Two approaches towards social transformation, both recent Frankfurt School developments, are presented: (1) the double asymmetry of the social (Herrmann), a concept that sees the strength of social bonds as stemming from the acceptance of difference and (2) the value-oriented philosophical approach to radically change patterns of everyday life practice (von Redecker). The latter finds expression in social protest movements such as Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion. Seen through the lens of the anti-psychiatry movement, some 'psychopathology' can be re-framed as a meaningful, resistant expression of social grievances. Our integrative approach provides a framework that makes room for non-violent difference, destigmatisation of real (as opposed to neurotic) anxiety and the anger it produces, recognition of and responsibility for the other instead of bilateral subjugation, and mutual vulnerability as a driving force for change in both subjects and systems, on the road to healing social pathologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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While the mainstream discourses of global climate strikes focus on the issue of generational justice, the experience in the context of East Asia has been under-researched. This study explores the local experience and interpretation of this movement among the young activists in Taiwan. The results show that climate strike is currently impossible in Taiwan. This study discusses this from the intersectionality of age and culture, namely, obsession with academic performance, low awareness of the right to strike, and parental intervention. It also highlights the strategies that young activists employ to reduce these barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I investigate the potential of a Kantian account of moral education to facilitate the development of humanity towards much‐needed change in individual and collective responses to global problems such as climate change. Kant's account of moral development is focused on the internal motivation for and not the external result of action. An often‐proposed strategy to tackle climate change consists of calling for various juridical sanctions, rules and laws that regulate the climate‐affecting actions of agents, as well as the behaviour of corporations and even nations. I agree with such approaches, which on a Kantian framework belong to the sphere of state or international legislation. Significantly, Kant emphasises that legal sanctions on external actions are only one of two main aspects of morality, the other being free actions and their underlying motivations. My focus is on investigating how Kant's account of moral progress on an individual and collective level can provide a perspective that complements the politico‐juridical solutions to this problem. My starting point is a brief overview of the available means of bettering human beings on an individual level. I then discuss Kant's propositions for moral change on the collective and eventually global levels, while showing the significance of shaping not only the global legal order, but also communal participation in the idea of the kingdom of ends. I then proceed to show how Kant's demanding account of the ethical community can be interpreted in a weaker sense and serve to better understand some modern problems and offer practical prescriptions for informal moral education on a collective level. In so doing, I apply the general account of moral education on the collective level to the problem of climate change, while showing that the Kantian means for moral progress might be of value in stopping humanity on its march to self‐destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from interviews with 31 young leading climate activists from 23 countries across the world this article aims to capture the contribution of the recent youth climate movement to communicating climate science and politics. We show that from the point of view of the youth activists, the movement powerfully connects personal and local experiences and emotions with climate science. This has enabled the activists to construct an authentic, generational and temporal identity that has helped them to carve out an autonomous position and voice with considerable moral authority among existing climate policy actors. Claiming to represent the future generation, we conclude that activists have offered an important added value to climate science as new ambassadors for scientific consensus and climate mitigation. The youth movement and the added value it brings communicating climate science is an example of the dynamics of the formation of “relational publics” and emphasizes the need to understand better the networked communication landscape where climate politics is debated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since late 2018, a global wave of mobilization under the banners of Fridays For Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) has injected new energy into global climate politics. FFF and XR took the world by storm, but have now been forced into (partial) latency as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. We believe this moment presents an opportunity for reflection. In particular, FFF and XR have been depicted as 'new' forms of climate activism. However, we argue that the extent to which these campaigns represent 'new' forms of climate activism is really a matter for closer investigation. In this Profile, we therefore reflect on the distinctiveness of the 'new climate activism' as compared to previous climate campaigns. Reviewing previous studies and our own research, we find that there are both elements of change and continuity in who participates and how, and that the main change appears to be the use of a more politically 'neutral' framing of climate change that is directed more strongly at state than non-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, there has been a significant rise in the number of global social movements, generating claims of a new networked era of global social movements, in which young people often play a central role. Young generations and social movements tend to identify with a diverse set of social and political issues on both a global and local scale, while often displaying a progressive and transversal outlook. Among these youth social movements, we find Fridays For Future, a youth climate organization noted for its unique scope and tactics as well as for illustrating the prominence of environmental issues in youth activism. Since 2018, the movement has progressively grown into a network composed of many local and national groups across the world. Beyond analysis of the global character of the movement and the profile and motivations of its activists, it seems opportune to look at how—at the organizational level—these local groups evolve and position themselves. Based on a social network and a content analysis of Fridays For Future-Barcelona’s Twitter account since its creation, this article explores the organization’s “glocal” and transversal dynamics, the relationship that might exist between these two, and the potential influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on these processes. The results show that, stemming from a global preoccupation for climate change, this Youth Climate Movement organization has been increasingly oriented towards local-level networking, anchoring its activism in local struggles and realities. They also show a positively-associated process—reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic—of increasing transversality, reflecting aspirations for global justice and the idea of an interdependency between climate change and other social, political and economic issues.

Various solutions have been suggested for the large climate impact of aviation, some of which would have far-reaching consequences for tourism. This study analyzes the discourses of climate protesters on this topic. Visual protest materials targeting aviation were photographed at three Swiss climate demonstrations in 2019 and analyzed using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse. The protesters criticize air travel for its climate impact, assign responsibility to the travelling public, and promote solutions involving reduced air travel demand. They omit offsetting and technological solutions, thereby diverging from the discourses of the Swiss media and the aviation industry. The tourism industry should prepare for possible changes in travel patterns which might occur if this movement succeeds in promoting its views.

In response to Huttunen and Albrecht's article in this issue of Fennia we want to focus our commentary on the two key-findings regarding the media representation of environmental citizenship in the Finnish Fridays for Future (FFF) movement: individualised lifestyle choices and a dominant adult voice. This commentary dovetails into the authors' critical reflection on the insufficiency of individual action alone in addressing environmental issues and the potential risks of a dominant adult voice for youth agency. By doing so, we will also touch on broader ideas of change within the FFF and climate change framing and aspects of (intergenerational) climate justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the representation of the Fridays for Future strikes in the German online newspapers Bild.de, Zeit Online and FAZ.net. Through a qualitative and quantitative content analysis over the time period August 2018 to March 2019, eight frames have been identified. Whereas Zeit Online shows a framing towards intergenerational justice, the coverage of FAZ.net and Bild.de strongly adheres to the protest paradigm. The majority of all articles guarantees protesters a voice, but this voice is often reduced to apolitical testimonies and the protesters' self-agency is undermined through disparagement. German media coverage thus tends to reproduce existing power structures by marginalizing and depoliticizing the political agenda of a system critical protest. Although this framing feeds into the shift of the climate change discourse towards adaptation, the study shows that the idea of climate change as an issue of intergenerational justice and children's rights has become part of the media's agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ciencia Política is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In December 2015, political leaders celebrated the Paris Agreement as a milestone in the global fight against climate change. Three years later, Greta Thunberg's school strike outside the Swedish parliament inspired thousands of students around the world to protest against their political leaders' inability to adequately respond to climate change. Envisioning livable climate futures for generations to come, the emerging “Fridays for Future” (FFF) movement urges governments to take more radical action on climate change. While FFF has sparked discussions about climate change around the world, the movement's effects on broader societal change remain unclear. We, therefore, explore how FFF has triggered debates beyond the necessity to tackle climate change and offer a framework to reflect upon the broader socio-political implications of the school strikes. We illustrate the contestation between different ideas of social life and political order encapsulated within and attached to FFF by analyzing the movement's self-understanding and the media discourse around these protests in Germany. Although the German government portrays the country as a pioneer in moving an industry-based economy toward decarbonization, the school strikes have quickly emerged and stabilized. We explore if and how the FFF protestors express not only the need for climate action but also call for deeper societal transformation. To do so, our study draws upon a discourse analysis based on news articles, official documents, and speeches, complemented by qualitative interviews with youth representatives and experts involved in the movement to identify competing imaginaries and themes of contestation. We study the tensions between competing student-led visions of the future through the lens of sociotechnical imaginaries, which allows us to illuminate and juxtapose moderate and radical approaches. In conclusion, current school protests are not only about climate action but reflect more fundamental political struggles about competing visions of a future society in times of climate change. Yet, the protestors' strong focus on science-driven politics risks to overshadow these broader societal debates, potentially stabilizing the techno-centric, apolitical and market-driven rationale behind climate action.

The growing popularity of Greta Thunberg has led an increasing number of pundits and scholars to consider her message to be an instance of 'climate' or 'environmental' populism. Following a qualitative content analysis of key speeches by the young activist, this paper challenges this view, and argues that her message is far from being a case of populism. On the contrary, it abides by a substantially different set of ideas that can be defined as technocratic ecocentrism. In particular, it is argued that rather than people‐centrism, anti‐elitism and vox populi, Greta Thunberg's message is grounded on three different core ideas: ecocentrism, technocracy, and on the exaltation of the vox scientifica. However, whereas Thunberg's technocratic ecocentrism is at odds with the foundations of the populist set of ideas, it shares a similar emphasis on monism, moralisation, a Manichean vision of the world, a critique of key features of the metapolitical status quo, and a tendency to personalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The contribution first outlines the state of research on the relatively new Fridays for Future (FFF) movement and categorizes first studies particularly from a German perspective, to provide a basis for a further differentiation in this field of research. In this context, fundamental aspects of the movement are presented. The self-concept of the German Fridays for Future movement in terms of a young protest movement with a global orientation is then compared against the educational tasks stipulated in the school legislation of the federal states (Bundesländer) with their societal-educational objectives. The contribution focuses on the question in how far the self-concept of the German branch of the FFF movement as an international protest movement and the activists' engagement for climate protection and political participation is reflected in the educational objectives stipulated in school legislation. Statements are analysed regarding climate and environmental protection, participation and democracy and transnational references in the school legislation. A link can be found between the self-concept of the Fridays for Future movement and school legislation, but this does not resolve the conflict between the school strikes and compulsory schooling – a conflict that is intended by FFF to highlight the perceived urgency of the cause. Schools, educational administrators and educational policymakers are thereby urged to take a stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]