Funny Climate Activism? An Analysis of Creative Digital Action by Young People

Introduction

The following is a summary and excerpts from the article ‘Funny climate activism? A collaborative storied analysis of young climate advocates’ digital activisms’. It was originally published in the journal Global Studies of Childhood in 2024 and was written by Sophie Chiew, Eve Mayes, Netta Maiava, Dani Villafaña and Natasha Abhayawickrama. These five researchers are associated with Striking Voices, a participatory research project exploring how young people in Australia use activism, creative storytelling, and education to fight for climate justice. Four of the authors are 19 to 22 years old and involved in climate justice organizing and one is a university-based researcher in their early 40s.

In the face of intersecting injustices, humour has the potential to enliven and sustain collective solidarity. Collective work towards climate justice feels good when ‘wacky’ actions are done together, stereotypes and affinities are laughed at… and false forms of liberation… are satirised. – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

Summary

The article explores the nature of humour in young people’s climate activism and the blending of online and offline modes. As the writers state:

We collaboratively analyse how young people use humour to dissent, through lampooning hierarchical power structures and profit-driven systems, drawing attention to intersectional injustices, and joyfully expressing affinity and solidarity. At the same time, humour may exclude, offend, and reinforce existing divisions and injustices. Humour is an underappreciated feature of organising towards a more just world, even as the pleasurable and just outcomes of humour are not guaranteed. – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

In exploring the role and value of humour, as well as other aspects of climate justice activism, the team used an approach to co-research that combined the experiences of all involved.

In developing the research team’s protocols and research methods, we have wondered how we could speak with other young climate justice organisers in ways that are respectful (of time and knowledge), just (of use and benefit to those pursuing climate justice), non-extractive (generative and reciprocal, rather than extracting and stealing stories and knowledge), and attuned to our complicity, as researchers, in unjust systems and structures (see Fine and Barreras, 2001; Leboiron, 2021). The team co-developed and practised ‘research conversations’ (the central project method) during project team meetings over Zoom: conversations where both the typical ‘participant’ and the ‘interviewers’ share experiences and insights, with at least one younger member of the project team involved. – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

The article provides examples of how humour builds solidarity while exposing injustices. Humour is often something that organically crops up in the process of making change. It makes activism fun, albeit in ways that can have drawbacks.

Humour and activism go hand in glove. Humour is a ‘serious matter of concern’ (Dodds and Kirby, 2013: 45) for social movement and climate change communication scholars (e.g. Boykoff and Osnes, 2019; ‘t Hart, 2007). Humour has been argued to have the potential to disrupt dominant messages and disarm systems of power (Sørensen, 2017), and to foster interpersonal connections that sustain social movement relationships (Hinzo and Clark, 2019). However, while humour in social movements and climate change communication can cleverly draw attention to the hypocrisies, inconsistencies and pretensions of power (Boykoff and Osnes, 2019: 154), using humour also risks trivialising or undermining its intended political message (Penney, 2019). – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

Humour has been used in many forms by School Strike for Climate (SS4C) during their protests. One common method has involved placards.

In recent years, scholars have analysed the importance of humour in the public-facing messaging of school strikers in their protest signs (e.g. Bowman, 2020) and visual communication (e.g. Catanzaro and Collin, 2023). Humorous placards created by young climate strikers have been argued to disrupt ‘routinized expression’ of political demands (Bowman, 2019: 9), be ‘vehicles of grassroots creativity’ and ‘bottom-up science communication’ (Hee et al., 2022: 2), hold public pedagogical potential (Mayes and Center, 2023), and breed ‘enthusiasm’ that sustains those involved (Catanzaro and Collin, 2023: 27). – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

Hee et al. (2022) identify and analyse specific forms of humour in in-person SS4C placards in Australia – from ‘[p]uns, rhymes and other forms of wordplay’, ‘[f]unny juxtapositions’, ‘[w]itty cultural references’, ‘[v]isual humor’, ‘[s]elf-deprecating humour’, to an ‘[u]nderlying theme of satire’ (7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14). – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

Humour also involves pranks, street theatre and ‘tactical frivolity’. Such actions have at times been deliberately misinterpreted by opponents and media outlets. The authors point to an example where activists convened outside Anthony Albanese’s office in 2019. The protest and its use of 200 kazoos to poorly play music was framed by conservative media outlets as a threatening attack on an individual. The following was recalled by one climate activist.

Dani: Yeah. . .we [had] made like a point of using a tagline that was like, ‘we have kazoos and we’re not afraid to use them’, because to us it was just a really, really funny thing for us as like fifteen-year-olds, to say to the man who would eventually become a Prime Minister. At the time, Albo wasn’t even Leader of the Opposition. So, to us he was just our local MP in the inner west, and we were like, ‘we’re going to attack you with kazoos’, because obviously, what’s he going to do? We’re not going to traumatise him with really bad kazoo playing. [Laughs] So, we thought that was a really fun action that got a lot of students really engaged in the issue and got a good turnout. Even though The Daily Telegraph seemed to think we were terrorising him… – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

The blending of online and offline activism and humour experienced one peak during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors discuss the importance of online participation and work during this time and since, both as a form of activism in itself and in promoting, organising and facilitating offline campaigning.

The authors found that humour can amplify generational differences. An example is given concerning young activists posting to Pinterest during the height of the pandemic so that people searching for images to do with companies would come across climate related memes.

This online action, creating and posting memes, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, was part of a broader repertoire of ‘digital storm’ tactics that erupted under lockdown conditions (Gulliver, 2022). Digital storm actions – also used by School Strike 4 Climate and other grassroots climate networks – also included calendar jamming (where multiple people simultaneously request meetings with a corporate executive and/or politician about the bank’s fossil fuel investments) and ‘jamming’ a bank’s online customer service response form (by multiple people simultaneously completing forms). In digital storm actions, time is set aside, online, and participants individually create/type, with the accompaniment of upbeat music. In the meme-creation action, Netta, her siblings and friends, created memes that generated humour for them: at the thought that someone could search the bank’s name on Pinterest and find a page of satirical memes. But this humour is not guaranteed to be shared by others and may misfire when shared across generational groups. The same action, attempted again with an older group of people, sparked the question, ‘what’s a meme?’ – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

The authors also found that often humour is something that effortlessly emerges in the process of young activists coming together. At the same time it can also help alleviate negative emotions. An example is given of an Instagram account that made use of memes and humorous juxtapositions mixing climate action slogans with images of Trinidadian-born rapper, singer and songwriter Nicki Minaj, someone who was not associated with the movement and whose fashion and style did not fit with stereotypes concerning it.

Sometimes there is no apparent strategy behind the uses of humour…  According to Natasha, the hyperbolic humour associated with this Nicki Minaj account, in the height of pandemic lockdowns, was a way to relieve the anxiety and stress associated with the intersecting pressures of facing climate change, a global pandemic, remote learning and remote organising. We wonder whether this Instagram account unintentionally functioned to ameliorate burnout at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

Drawing on the work of adrienne maree brown the authors argue in favour of humour based on ‘pleasure activism’. brown defines this as “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.” (brown, 2019: 13)

Many young people are overwhelmed and outraged by the ongoing influence of fossil fuel interests in national and international climate policy-making, and the disconnect between government rhetoric and reality of ‘climate action.’ At the same time, children and young people experience overlapping and dynamically shifting emotions in relation to climate change (Jones and Davison, 2021; Verlie, 2022) – particularly young people who identify as involved in climate activism and advocacy. While there has been growing scholarly and medical attention to the correlations between young people’s eco-anxiety, despair and anger and perceived inadequate governmental action on climate change (Hickman et al., 2021), feelings of anxiety, despair and rage move in dynamic affective relation with feelings of love, joy, love and hope. Young people are anxious AND laughing at the short-sightedness of politician’s inaction in the face of such a serious issue. They are enraged at the power of fossil fuel interests AND rolling their eyes. And these feelings move across hybrid spaces. – Chiew, Mayes, Maiava, Villafaña and Abhayawickrama, 2024

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‘Funny climate activism? A collaborative storied analysis of young climate advocates’ digital activisms’.

References

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• Catanzaro M, Collin P (2023) Kids communicating climate change: Learning from the visual language of the SchoolStrike4Climate protests. Educational Review 75(1): 9–32.
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• Hee M, Jürgens A-S, Fiadotava A, et al. (2022) Communicating urgency through humor: School Strike 4 Climate protest placards. Journal of Science Communication 21(5): 1–26.
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