Fighting for Their Future: An Exploratory Study of Online Community Building in the Youth Climate Change Movement

Emily Wielk; Alecea Standlee

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.17.2.02

Authors

Emily Wielk George Washington University, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0516-9927
Alecea Standlee Gettysburg College, USA https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4468-7145

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.17.2.02

Keywords:

Digital Ethnography, Climate Activism, Youth, Social Media, Social Movements

Abstract

While offline iterations of the climate activism movement have spanned decades, today online involvement of youth through social media platforms has transformed the landscape of this social movement. Our research considers how youth climate activists utilize social media platforms to create and direct social movement communities towards greater collective action. Our project analyzes narrative framing and linguistic conventions to better understand how youth climate activists utilized Twitter to build community and mobilize followers around their movement. Our project identifies three emergent strategies, used by youth climate activists, that appear effective in engaging activist communities on Twitter. These strategies demonstrate the power of digital culture, and youth culture, in creating a collective identity within a diverse generation. This fusion of digital and physical resistance is an essential component of the youth climate activist strategy and may play a role in the future of emerging social movements.

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Author Biographies

Emily Wielk, George Washington University, USA

Emily Wielk is a current graduate student in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program (Public Policy track), as well as a teaching assistant in the Department of Sociology at George Washington University. Her research has focused on digital activism and the intersections of sport and gender using primarily qualitative research methodologies. Currently, she is working on book chapters for an anthology on women’s leadership in the 1950s at the advent of second-wave feminism.

Alecea Standlee, Gettysburg College, USA

Alecea Standlee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Gettysburg College, in the United States. Her scholarship examines the implications of the integration and normalization of online communication technologies in the lives of Millennials and Gen Z. Specifically, her works seek to discuss the impact of strategic surveillance by corporate media platforms to collect, distribute, manage, and utilize individual-level data on participants’ perceptions of privacy, individual identity representation, and group affiliation. She has published in New Media & Society, Inside Higher Ed, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and elsewhere.

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