Youth Climate Influence(rs) and the Politics of Attention

Social media has allowed for activists to organize transnationally, reach substantial audiences, and find new pathways towards institutional political influence. Yet as part of their strategic use of social media platforms, certain youth activists have gained new degrees of internet celebrity while others have been largely erased from narratives celebrating global youth climate activism. These inequitable dynamics at the intersection of new media and social movement organizing demand that we pay attention to attention itself as a key dimension and outcome of organizing efforts. It is critical also to interrogate who obtains attention and who does not and to ask why. 

As an effort to analyze and ultimately rebalance the distribution of attention, this ongoing project uses digital storytelling approaches and digital multimedia research to develop interactive accounts of youth climate organizing. This area of my work aims to speak to the longer histories and broader geographies of contemporary youth climate activism, while also honoring the broad emotional landscapes of youth climate organizing and digital content creation, from anxiety and grief to humor and political satire.