Youth Activism for Climate on and Beyond Social media: Insights from FridaysForFuture-Rome

The FridaysForFuture movement (FFF), launched by Greta Thumberg's school strikes in 2018, has led a new wave of climate activism worldwide. Young people are at the forefront, with social media serving both as mobilizing tools and expressive spaces. Drawing upon literature on youth and digital activism with a generational, situated approach, we account for how both the climate struggle and social media are appropriated by FFF-activists as part of their own youth grassroots politics. Moreover, we explore the activities they mix and the strategies they adopt when moving across online and offline environments. From July 2020 to January 2021, we carried out 6 months of ethnographic work with(in) the FFF-Rome group by blending participant observation of assemblies and protests with digital ethnography on the homonym WhatsApp group. Results’ thematic analysis shows that FFF-activists believe climate activism to be their own fight and social media their own battlefield. A generational understanding of digital climate activism emerges at the intersection of the appropriation of the dispute (climate change) and the digital environments (social media). Findings also account for broader logics and strategies adopted by FFF-activists, on and beyond social media. They move seamlessly between online and offline, spanning across and negotiating with different platforms according to political goals and target audiences. These results contribute to overcoming reductive or marginalizing approaches to youth activism, to legitimizing and situating young activists’ social media usage practices within an array of grassroots political practices, and to understanding how generational belonging affects such practices in the Italian context.

Using Digital Tools for Studying About and Addressing Climate Change

Grounded in research-based examples, this chapter provides a resource for students, teachers, and researchers to critically engage with issues of climate change through leveraging the affordances of digital tools. In particular, the authors discuss the affordances and challenges of students using digital tools to address climate change. They also review research in this field, including studies on visualizations, analyzing information, social media, digital videos, digital role-play, video games, and virtual and augmented reality. The chapter describes how digital tools offer meaning-making possibilities for students to propose solutions to climate change through engaging multimodal narratives, as well as share their voices through digital activism. Considering that global climate change is perhaps the most serious problem human beings have ever faced, this chapter offers implications for curriculum and instruction to aid educators with designing digital projects for students to understand climate change and find ways to take a stand.

Rise and Fall of Digital Activism in Mexico From 2000-2019

Political activism is more alive than ever. After the scandal of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, online social media platforms restricted the distribution of content to privacy laws. But populism disruption in many countries fosters political discontent. Online protests and everyday claims are rising. Add to this context environmental problems and an absence of an ideological framework. All these conditions foster the use of digital activism. But this field of research has studied single cases, losing connections with societies and history. The aim of this chapter is to explain the evolution of digital activism in a long period of time. To achieve such purpose, the author analyzes 11 Mexican events that took place from 2000 to 2019 and provide a classification framework to understand how digital activism transforms over time.

Fenomena Buzzer Dalam Kontroversi Omnibus Law Di Media Sosial

In modern times like today, the development of information and communication technology is very rapid and cannot be stopped. Without realizing it, this technological development brings changes to human social behavior, technology offers new ways for humans to communicate through various new media (New Media). One of the New Media that is a product of technological developments that greatly affect our daily lives is social media. As time goes by, social media is not only a medium of communication or just spending free time. More than that, social media now has several other roles, one of which is as a means of conveying criticism of the situation created under a state government agency as well as a means of political campaigns for representation from the state government. With the formation of new behaviors in conveying voices in public spaces, many new things are also born, one of which is the buzzer phenomenon. Bauzzer on social media is associated with a party related to increasing trends and discussions on social media, it can be said that the buzzer is a raiser of issues or discussions about something on social media. On this occasion, the researcher will discuss the buzzer phenomenon on the controversial issue of undang-undang cipta kerja or omnibus lawKeywords: social media, buzzer, omnibus law, digital activism. AbstrakPada masa modern seperti sekarang ini, perkembangan teknologi informasi dan komunikasi sangatlah pesat dan tidak bisa di hentikan. Tanpa disadari, perkembangan teknologi ini membawa perubahan pada perilaku sosial manusia, teknologi menawarkan cara baru kepada manusia dalam berkomunikasi melalui berbagai media baru (New Media). Salah satu New Media yang menjadi produk perkembangan teknologi yang sangat berpengaruh pada kehidupan kita sehari-hari adalah media sosial. Seiring berjalannya waktu media sosial tidak hanya sebagai media komunikasi ataupun sekedar menghabiskan waktu luang. Lebih dari itu, media sosial kini telah memiliki beberapa peran lain salah satunya sebagai sarana penyampaian kritik atas situasi yang tercipta dibawah sebuah pemerintahan lembaga negara maupun sarana kampanye politik bagi representasi dari pemerintahan negara. Dengan terbentuknya perilaku baru dalam manyampaikan suara pada ruang publik, banyak hal baru pun ikut terlahir, salah satunya adalah fenomena buzzer. Bauzzer di sosial media di kaitkan dengan suatu pihak yang terkait dengan peningkatan trend dan bahasan di sosial media, bisa dikatakan bahwa buzzer merupakan pengangkat isu-isu atau pembahasan mengenai sesuatu di sosial media. Pada kesempatan kali ini peneliti akan membahas mengenai fenomena buzzer pada isu kontroversional UU cipta kerja atau omnibus lawKatakunci: media sosial, buzzer, omnibus law, aktivisme digital.

Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research

This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. The final issue of our thirty-year retrospective shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia.

Digital activism and collective mourning by Chinese netizens during COVID-19

This study examines the discursive practice of mourning and commenting by netizens on the final social media post made by Dr Li Wenliang, regarding it as a form of political participation and competitive discursive politics enacted in cyberspace. Discourse theory is applied to conduct discourse analysis on 4000 comments. We identified two strategies that netizens used to establish an alternative space for discourse. The first involved hidden protests expressed through multi-semantic mourning, avoiding suppression by indirectly challenging official authorities. Second, through engagement with microblogs, netizens applied personalized narratives to form a collective memory and a counter-memory space that departed from the official normative narrative. Discursive activities enacted by netizens stimulated the political agenda of resilient adjustment on the part of the authorities, leading the government to accept and incorporate public demands into policies through strategic rectification. These findings help to better understand the significant power of disorganized connective action that is reliant on affective citizens and the further development of regime resilience on the part of the Chinese political system in response to digital activities.

“Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade”: Exploring LGBTI+ digital activism in Turkey

This article analyses the #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü (Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade) hashtag campaign for 2019 Pride month in Turkey, expressing the collective frustration of the LGBTI+ community against long-lasting bans for LGBTI+ events and public assembly. Drawing on a digital ethnography from Twitter, the article explores networked resistances within the complexity of online and offline entanglements of activism during Istanbul Pride 2019. The multimodal discourse analysis conducted in this article focuses on the interactions of digital affordances and embodied street actions in rearticulating queer political places. The study emphasizes the important role of hashtag activism in the (re)making of place as a trans-located experience, as well as affording emergent LGBTI+ resistances.

Mengupayakan Keadilan Bagi Korban Kekerasan Seksual Melalui Aktivisme Tagar: Kesempatan dan Kerentanan di Indonesia

Digital technology brings new opportunities to accessing justice for women and marginalized groups after being excluded from conventional-masculine technology for decades. In the internet era, the use of social media has become very massive and intensive, therefore feminist activism in this digital space is unavoidable. Hashtag activism has become popular since the #MeToo movement and such an opportunity to seek justice for victims and survivors through voicing and documenting their voices. The use of hashtags (#) opens up opportunities for victims’ stories to be documented, connect with other stories, and go viral. In Indonesia, the use of hashtags in activism also occurs in more local contexts such as #KitaAgni, #SaveIbuNuril, #UIITidakAman, #KamiBersamaKorban, and #SahkanRUUPKS. Some hashtag activism has succeeded in initiating follow-up actions in the offline world, although not always viral stories get satisfactory case resolutions. This study uses a qualitative approach, and collecting the data through literature studies, especially on feminist theories ariund technology and digital such as; Science and Technology Studies (STS) feminism, cyberfeminism, technofeminism, and feminist digital activism. This paper finds that the digital space is a contested space where there are opportunities and vulnerabilities for victims, activists, and netizens to seek justice through hashtag activism.

Shaheen Bagh: Making sense of (re)emerging “Subaltern” feminist political subjectivities in hashtag publics through critical, feminist interventions

In this article, we examine protest of India’s passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registry of Citizens (NRC) which spurred instances of physical and digital protest. We study the intersections of gender, political subjectivities, and digital activism among anti-CAA-NRC activists, specifically the “Women of Shaheen Bagh.” We discuss our data collection methods, description, and analysis of the protests in the context of larger questions, including how critical, feminist researchers may engage with data tools and how forms of gendered, transnational protest are mediated and represented via individual images, texts, and videos that make up social media data. We illuminate the formation of political subjectivities in the context of transnational, digital protest movements by re-appropriating computational and data tools. This article seeks to demonstrate an interdisciplinary engagement between critical, feminist approaches to knowledge and subject formation and data science approaches to social network analysis and data visualization techniques.