TEAM

Lorenzo Zamponi, Marco Deseriis, and Diego Ceccobelli

START YEAR 2020

END YEAR 2021

2019 has seen an unprecedented wave of school strikes, under the label #FridaysForFuture. On March 15th, 2019, there were 2382 demonstrations in 135 countries. 2.3 million people, mainly school students, took the streets to demand action in response to climate change, following a series of Friday school strikes launched by Swedish student Greta Thunberg. A series of school strikes followed the March strike, representing a historical turn in climate activism. This wave of climate protest mobilisation is unique in its tactics, global scope and appeal to teenage school students. Media coverage of these protests and high-level national and international political meetings involving the movement’s icon, Greta Thunberg, illustrate a level of global attention that no previous youth movement has ever received. Research shows the emergence of a new generation of climate activists and the possible development of FFF as a broader, grassroots movement, with a strong female presence and reliance on social media and peer networks. It highlights limited commitment to established environmental organisations, with varying interpretations of the importance of lifestyle politics and a hopeful attitude towards the future.

In this context, our research project aims at investigating both the internal organisational dynamics and the communication dimension of the climate movement in two European countries, Italy and Belgium. On the one hand, offline, FFF represents an innovation in the field of environmental politics, with the massive participation of young people, not involved in traditional environmental organisations or in social movements milieus. It seems to be an occasion of mass activation of a whole generation, with the climate crisis acting as a trigger for action because it singles out this generation, it provides it with something that defines it and characterise it. On the other hand, online, it is undeniable that the mediatisation of Greta Thunberg’s figure and the widespread use of social media have favoured a form of participation that escapes the traditional channels of activists’ recruitment, establishing a direct identification between individual students, or peer groups, and the issue of the climate crisis, with Greta as its most recognisable icon.

The project aims at addressing these two different components and its interactions, through the lenses of social movement studies and social media analysis, in two major European countries, bridging the analysis of climate-related collective action and the analysis of the role of social media in political participation.

*Original Picture by Tommi Boom, released under the CC License Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) and here partially cut and modified

FUNDING

Scuola Normale Superiore