Communicating intergenerational justice and climate change: a study of youth-generated environmental discourses

Abstract

Awareness of climate change as an intergenerational issue with inequitable risk burden for younger generations is a relatively recent phenomenon. However, youth activists have already managed to come to occupy a meaningful role in climate advocacy. Accepting the invitation to search for positive new discourses to live by, this paper applies a positive discourse analytical lens to the study of the online discourses produced by the youth climate activists of Generation Climate Europe (GCE), the largest coalition of youth-led networks on climate and environmental issues at the European level, examining how GCE newsletters and podcasts use discursive strategies and multimodal resources to communicate their message. The (corpus-assisted) positive discourse analysis of this GCE-produced content revealed that the youth activists designed a complex virtual space brimming with cross-references, intertextuality, and options for its audience that projected an identity for the coalition as a productive, solution-oriented, and agentive organization. The discourses produced by GCE were carefully tailored to a specific interpretive community and they aimed to both claim and impart authority and expertise. GCE’s interactional practices strove to generate wiggle room to resist the status quo and advocate for critical issues such as intergenerational justice and institutional transparency. In disclosing these results, the authors hope to have contributed to understandings of how sustainable climate advocacy is currently being enacted by youth within digital communication across platforms.

Keywords

• intergenerational justice
• online advocacy
• positive discourse analysis
• sustainable climate advocacy
• young climate activism