Abstract:
Since mid-2018, school students across the world have been leading mass strikes to demand strengthened political action on climate change. This paper explores how young people’s political participation in the School Strike for Climate movement in Australia was represented in newspaper coverage over a 17- month period (August 2018–December 2019), with particular attention to the representation of young people’s emotions and actions, and the roles and responses of schools. The paper works with a corpus of 500 articles published in 29 Australian national, state and regional (NSW and Victoria) newspapers. The corpus is read with affective-discursive attunement to historical representations of children and young people and contemporary media representational politics surrounding climate justice activism, informed by Sara Ahmed’s politics of emotion and Chantal Mouffe’s analysis of politics as passion. I consider four dominant characterisations of the young strikers: ignorant zealots, anxious pawns, rebellious truants, and extraordinary heroes, and map the spectrum of school and school systems’ reported responses to the strikes: from non-support with disciplinary consequences, to non-support for striking during the school week, to permission to support the strike on school grounds only, to parental discretion, to active support. Alongside these characterisations, I explore how some young people have spoken back to negative media characterisations and stifling institutional responses, and consider implications for future research with young climate justice activists.