Fridays for Future: An Intersectional Lens on Youth Activism and Its Intersectional Activism

In August 2018, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg began demonstrating for climate justice in front of the Swedish parliament. This protest developed into the global protest movement Fridays For Future, which, according to the organisers, encompassed 163 countries and over four million people in September 2019. Since 2019, teenagers and young adults have been at the forefront of tackling the climate crisis and are able to mobilise the masses for climate justice. Fridays For Future has created a youth activism that is unique in its global reach and the low average age of its activists, as well as the above-average proportion of women. Against the background of these characteristics, the presentation analyses the climate justice movement of Fridays For Future in Austria from an intersectional perspective and using a mixed-methods approach: First, an intersectional analysis is used to show which social categories shape the Fridays For Future movement in order to understand which activists are part of the social movement. Finally, the extent to which social categories such as gender and age shape the perception of problems and the motivation of activists is analysed. Last but not least, by analysing intersectional activism, it becomes clear to what extent diversity and inclusion are part of the self-image and strategy of the Fridays For Future movement, and to what extent hierarchies, social inequalities or forms of exclusion are perpetuated in the social movement. Such an intersectional analysis is still a relatively new phenomenon in the field of social movement research, even though the concept of ‘intersectionality’ emerged from political activism. The presentation thus makes a significant contribution to the intersectional analysis of the climate justice movement.