Dottorato in COMUNICAZIONE, RICERCA SOCIALE E MARKETING

Titolo della tesi: Who is ‘We’ in ‘We, the future without future?’ On generational identity and youth (digital) activism in and beyond FridaysForFuture-Rome

The average global temperatures spiked in the last century and extreme climate phenomena became increasingly and dramatically common. The conditions of the planet have contributed to inaugurating a novel wave of climate activism, which sees an important contribution in young people, who are mobilizing worldwide to ask for better policies to face what has been defined as humanity’s greatest challenge. The FridaysForFuture (FFF for short) movement has especially been at the forefront of this fight. Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s 2018 Friday school strikes in front of the Swedish Parliament, the movement has spread globally in a complex network of national and local groups that share common values and goals (inclusivity, intersectionality, decarbonization...) but also express their unique geographical and cultural identity as they localize the climate fight to each group’s necessities. As it is already clear from the name ‘FridaysForFuture,’ the movement’s fight is strongly connected to the generational identity and youth-based sense-makings of its members. Incipient literature on FFF has observed how especially young activists join the movement to safeguard the interests of their own generation, following the idea that older generations have doomed the planet and taken the future away from younger people. In this context, social media are privileged platforms for FFF activists, who resort to them for advocacy and awareness-raising, while also recruiting adhesions to the movement in a continuous hybridization of meanings and practices that blurs the boundaries between online and offline spaces. FFF-activists’ social media usage practices are also informed by younger people’s media ideologies (Gershon 2010b) and sense-makings and can therefore open windows in the unique ways young people understand social media as environments for both digital activism and generational identity-building processes. Informed by literature addressing identity making practices, collective identity, generational ‘we sense,’ digital and youth activism, this thesis investigates the interplay between generational identity and youth social media activism focusing on the FFF group of FFF-Rome. This study is a multimethod qualitative research, combining a six-month multimodal ethnography (of the group’s activities and its Instagram page) and semi-structured interviews to FFF-Rome activists. Consistent with an ecological approach to social media, this method allowed for the direct observation of social actions as they happened, preventing a disjunction between their contexts and individual and collective meanings. These choices were complementary with the adoption of innovative ethical standards and practices of engaged research. As a result, this thesis advocates for ‘committed’ research when studying social movements, favoring research appropriation by the activists and in solidarity with their fight. Concretely, this work answers the following research questions: 1. How do FFF-Rome activists combine their generational identity with being climate activists? 2. What can the case of FFF-Rome tell us about the current generation of youth (climate) activists and, more in general, about the identity of this generation of young people? 3. How do social media usage practices and FFF-Rome’s identity mutually shape each other? 4. How do FFF-Rome activists negotiate social media usage practices and norms within the movement? Part 1 addresses RQ 1 and 2 by observing how the activists combine a generational understanding of climate activism and climate change with their own identity as young people of the 21st century. Part 2 answers RQs 3 and 4 by analyzing how the activists appropriate digital platforms as youth’s ‘own’ channels, and how they move seamlessly between online and offline environments, negotiating architectural and technical affordances. While different parts of this thesis answer distinct research questions, all sections are strongly interconnected and contribute to all research questions collectively. The conclusions especially highlight this bond and suggest that changes in the communicative infrastructures have essentially redefined the communicative and political practices of climate activism. It is not just the struggle that is generationally connoted, but also the communicative channels and the protest practices that accompany it. FFF-Rome activists fully legitimize digital activism and incorporate it in all phases of their struggle, intertwining social media ideologies (Gershon 2010b) with activist ideologies. In this context, social media are considered both as a means to an end and as digital spaces young people ‘own’ in virtue of their being young.