Papers by Jill Hopke
In 2015, meeting in Paris for the Conference of the Parties (COP21), representatives of 195 natio... more In 2015, meeting in Paris for the Conference of the Parties (COP21), representatives of 195 nations set an ambitious goal to reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by mid-century. This research uses the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which took place in Paris during 30 November to 11 December 2015, as a case study of Twitter coverage of the talks by mainstream and alternative media outlets and other climate stakeholders, including activists and fossil fuel industry groups. It compares the British Guardian with other media and climate stakeholders’ visual framing of climate change on Twitter during COP21, because the publication had launched an advocacy campaign in March 2015 promoting fossil fuel divestment in the lead-up to COP21. Findings show that individual activists and movement organizations functioned similarly in climate change visual framing in Twitter posts, as did individual and organizational multinational representatives and scientific experts. The news media categories varied by type of news organization. The major outliers were the fossil fuel industry and trade association accounts. Industry stakeholders largely focused on former US President Barack Obama’s climate policy, promoting the perception of a lack of domestic support for his climate policies in their visual Twitter postings.
In 2015, meeting in Paris for the Conference of the Parties (COP21), representatives of 195 natio... more In 2015, meeting in Paris for the Conference of the Parties (COP21), representatives of 195 nations set an ambitious goal to reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by mid-century. This research uses the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which took place in Paris during 30 November to 11 December 2015, as a case study of Twitter coverage of the talks by mainstream and alternative media outlets and other climate stakeholders, including activists and fossil fuel industry groups. It compares the British Guardian with other media and climate stakeholders’ visual framing of climate change on Twitter during COP21, because the publication had launched an advocacy campaign in March 2015 promoting fossil fuel divestment in the lead-up to COP21. Findings show that individual activists and movement organizations functioned similarly in climate change visual framing in Twitter posts, as did individual and organizational multinational representatives and scientific experts. The news media categories varied by type of news organization. The major outliers were the fossil fuel industry and trade association accounts. Industry stakeholders largely focused on former US President Barack Obama’s climate policy, promoting the perception of a lack of domestic support for his climate policies in their visual Twitter postings.
En este capítulo se abordan las percepciones de la ciudadanía sobre la minería en Colombia. A par... more En este capítulo se abordan las percepciones de la ciudadanía sobre la minería en Colombia. A partir de un análisis de la opinión pública nacional se analizan tanto las percepciones positivas como negativas sobre la minería y el nivel de aceptación al control local sobre esta actividad. En nuestra investigación se pretende desentrañar el origen cognitivo y socio demográfico de estas actitudes, y la importancia de los medios de comunicación y la conversación política en la formación de opinión pública frente al sector minero-energético. Para ello se utiliza el modelo teórico de la mediación comunicativa, que permite evidenciar el peso relativo de las orientaciones de los individuos, los estímulos mediáticos y las redes sociales sobre la opinión pública en un tema determinado.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science, 2017
Divestment is a socially responsible investing tactic to remove assets from a sector or industry ... more Divestment is a socially responsible investing tactic to remove assets from a sector or industry based on moral objections to its business practices. It has historical roots in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The early-21st-century fossil fuel divestment movement began with climate activist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” McKibben’s argument centers on three numbers. The first is 2°C, the international target for limiting global warming that was agreed upon at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 2009 Copenhagen conference of parties (COP). The second is 565 Gigatons, the estimated upper limit of carbon dioxide that the world population can put into the atmosphere and reasonably expect to stay below 2°C. The third number is 2,795 Gigatons, which is the amount of proven fossil fuel reserves. That the amount of proven reserves is five times that which is allowable within the 2°C limit forms the basis for calls to divest.
The aggregation of individual divestment campaigns constitutes a movement with shared goals. Divestment can also function as “tactic” to indirectly apply pressure to targets of a movement, such as in the case of the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States. Since 2012, the fossil fuel divestment movement has been gaining traction, first in the United States and United Kingdom, with student-led organizing focused on pressuring universities to divest endowment assets on moral grounds.
In partnership with 350.org, The Guardian launched its Keep it in the Ground campaign in March 2015 at the behest of outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. Within its first year, the digital campaign garnered support from more than a quarter-million online petitioners and won a “campaign of the year” award in the Press Gazette’s British Journalism Awards. Since the launch of The Guardian’s campaign, “keep it in the ground” has become a dominant frame used by fossil fuel divestment activists.
Divestment campaigns seek to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry. The rationale for divestment rests on the idea that fossil fuel companies are financially valued based on their resource reserves and will not be able to extract these reserves with a 2°C or lower climate target. Thus, their valuation will be reduced and the financial holdings become “stranded assets.” Critics of divestment have cited the costs and risks to institutional endowments that divestment would entail, arguing that to divest would go against their fiduciary responsibility. Critics have also argued that divesting from fossil fuel assets would have little or no impact on the industry. Some higher education institutions, including Princeton and Harvard, have objected to divestment as a politicization of their endowments. Divestment advocates have responded to this concern by pointing out that not divesting is not a politically neutral act—it is, in fact, choosing the side of fossil fuel corporations.
In this article, we test the relationships between Twitter and Facebook use on mobile phones and ... more In this article, we test the relationships between Twitter and Facebook use on mobile phones and political conversation with offline and online political participation, as well as online expressive communication. Our findings show that using Twitter on mobile phones is associated with a higher likelihood for both online and offline political participation, as well as online expressive communication. Using Facebook is associated with a higher likelihood for online expressive communication only. The key contribution of this article is to show empirical differences between the relationships of social media and social networking on mobile devices with political participation and online expressive communication. Public social media apps, such as Twitter, bring mobile communication back into the public realm of a (albeit diffused) broadcast-like channel. Mobile Twitter adds to the affordances of mobility, networked connectivity, and the publicness of social media.
In order to develop conceptual models that reflect the realities of networked communicative proce... more In order to develop conceptual models that reflect the realities of networked communicative processes scholars must examine both the underlying network structure and the content of these ties. Using mixed methods, I apply a relational perspective to the role of digital technologies in transnational organizing, using activism against high-volume hydraulic fracturing as a case study. In-depth interviews are combined with social network analysis of hyper-linkages between organizations supporting a day of action calling for a ban on fracking, Global Frackdown. Analysis shows that activism against unconventional fossil fuels brings together very localized concerns about environmental risks associated with extractive industries with more abstract global concerns. I apply the concept of translocal to examine environmental organizations and movements. This conceptual shift focuses on the brokerage role of global-minded local groups in mediating global issues back to the hyper-local scale. While international NGOs play a coordinating role, local groups with a global worldview can connect transnational movements to the hyper-local scale by networking with groups that are too small to appear in a transnational network.
This study attempts to understand how the use of new communication technology, specifically mobil... more This study attempts to understand how the use of new communication technology, specifically mobile phone use, is associated with offline homogeneous, heterogeneous communication, and political media use in the case of Colombia. Whether and how social stratification of the public may influence these relationship is also investigated. After conducting correlation and regression analyses, findings show that the use of mobile phone has a strong, positive effect on facilitating all the outcome measures: offline homogeneous ...
High-volume hydraulic fracturing, a drilling simulation technique commonly referred to as “fracki... more High-volume hydraulic fracturing, a drilling simulation technique commonly referred to as “fracking,” is a contested technology. In this article, we explore discourse over hydraulic fracturing and the shale industry on the social media platform Twitter during a period of heightened public contention regarding the application of the technology. We study the relative prominence of negative messaging about shale development in relation to pro-shale messaging on Twitter across five hashtags (#fracking, #globalfrackdown, #natgas, #shale, and #shalegas). We analyze the top actors tweeting using the #fracking hashtag and receiving @mentions with the hashtag. Results show statistically significant differences in the sentiment about hydraulic fracturing and shale development across the five hashtags. In addition, results show that the discourse on the main contested hashtag #fracking is dominated by activists, both individual activists and organizations. The highest proportion of tweeters, those posting messages using the hashtag #fracking, were individual activists, while the highest proportion of @mention references went to activist organizations.
I examine a 2-week window into an environmental movement trying to gain traction in the public sp... more I examine a 2-week window into an environmental movement trying to gain traction in the public sphere, centered on a transnational day of action calling for a ban on the drilling technology, high-volume hydraulic fracturing, the Global Frackdown. Twitter serves a different purpose for the anti-fracking Global Frackdown movement than other Internet-based
communications, most notably email listservs. Findings show that Global Frackdown tweeters engage in framing practices of movement convergence and solidarity, declarative and targeted engagement, prefabricated messaging, and multilingual
tweeting. In contrast to Global Frackdown tweeters’ use of the platform for in-the-moment communication, Global Frackdown activists report in in-depth interviews that they place more emphasis on private (i.e., listservs) communication channels for longer term, durable movement building. The episodic, crowdsourced, and often personalized, transnational
framing practices of Global Frackdown tweeters support core organizers’ goal of promoting the globalness of activism to ban
fracking. This research extends past scholarship on socially mediated activism by providing a case study of how environmental activists use Twitter for ephemeral movement communication during a pre-planned transnational day of action, blurring internal movement collective identity-building and affirmation with publicly enacted strategic framing.
In this dissertation, I study the network structure and content of a transnational movement again... more In this dissertation, I study the network structure and content of a transnational movement against hydraulic fracturing and shale development, Global Frackdown. I apply a relational perspective to the study of role of digital technologies in transnational political organizing. The core question driving this inquiry is: In what ways are environmental activists using new media technologies to challenge socio-political power structures? I examine the structure of the social movement through analysis of hyperlinking patterns and qualitative analysis of the content of the ties of one European strand of the movement. I explicate three actor types: coordinator, broker, and hyper-local. This research intervenes in the paradigm that considers international actors as the key nodes to understanding transnational advocacy networks. I argue this focus on the international scale obscures the role of globally minded local groups in mediating global issues back to the hyper-local scale. While international NGOs play a coordinating role, local groups with a global worldview can connect transnational movements to the hyper-local scale by networking with groups that are too small to appear in a transnational network.
I also examine the movement’s messaging on the social media platform Twitter. Findings show that Global Frackdown tweeters engage in framing practices of: movement convergence and solidarity, declarative and targeted engagement, prefabricated messaging, and multilingual tweeting. Global Frackdown tweeters integrate personal action frames with collective action frames, as well as engage in hybrid framing practices, that I describe as transnational frame jumping. The episodic, loosely-coordinated and often personalized, transnational framing practices of Global Frackdown tweeters support core organizers’ goal of promoting the globalness of activism to ban fracking. Global Frackdown activists use Twitter as a tool to advance the movement and to bolster its moral authority, as well as to forge linkages between localized groups on a transnational scale.
In order to contextualize the anti-hydraulic fracturing social movement within the wider mediated discourse on the shale industry, I also study the relative prominence of negative messaging about shale development in relation to pro-shale messaging on Twitter across five hashtags (#fracking, #globalfrackdown, #natgas, #shale, and #shalegas). I analyze the top actors tweeting using the #fracking hashtag and receiving @mentions with the hashtag. Results show statistically significant differences in the sentiment about shale development across the five hashtags. Results show the discourse on the main contested hashtag #fracking is dominated by activists, both individual activists and organizations. The highest proportion of tweeters posting messages using the hashtag #fracking were individual activists, while the highest proportion of @mention references went to activist organizations. These results suggest hashtags can act as cohesive mediated public spheres within and of themselves. Thus, hashtags can be thought of as reflective of, and formative of, distinct “hashtag publics.”
This study shows that activism against unconventional fossil fuels brings together very localized concerns about environmental risks associated with extractive industries with more abstract global concerns. I conceptualize this type of movement as a translocal environmental movements, which includes the following dimensions: the fusing of material and symbolic concerns, linkages across affected and potentially affected communities in at least two world regions, a sense of shared interests and goals, and the framing of opposition to shale development in terms of both local concerns and global ones.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
In this article, I compare the origins and early development of the Occupy movement with that of ... more In this article, I compare the origins and early development of the Occupy movement with that of the Spanish 15M, the Indignados or ‘outraged,’ movement. How movements are integrated into longer-lived global networks has been insufficiently studied. The ‘hyperlink’ can serve as a material representation of more durable affiliations between entities with a shared collective identity, in this case activist websites, reflecting underlying network structures. Combining qualitative analysis of movement identities and narratives with analysis of hyperlinking patterns provides a more holistic understanding of the interrelations between the 15M and Occupy movements. I argue that similarities in the structural hyperlinked network properties of the 15M and Occupy movements, and their transnational interlinkages can be explained in part by commonalities in the two movements’ collective identities and dominant narratives.
Journal of Radio & Audio Media, May 2015
This study examines how community radio operates transnationally through a media ethnography of t... more This study examines how community radio operates transnationally through a media ethnography of the Latin American Association of Radio Education (ALER) executive secretariat in Quito, Ecuador. Findings show that ALER staff members share a common vision of their work based around 4 themes: collective self-representations, unity, inclusion, and transformation. Having a shared collective conviction in the transformative function of radio shapes how ALER staff conceptualize its journalistic production. This research advances
knowledge of how community radio scales-up to the transnational level and the shared values underlying this journalistic practice.
Environmental Communication, 2012
This article explores mainstream and alternative press discourses of conflict over metallic minin... more This article explores mainstream and alternative press discourses of conflict over metallic mining in El Salvador. Through identifying mainstream and counter-frames, I show how an anti-mining movement achieved a position of short-term prominence within the dominant media discourse surrounding gold mining. However, even when the movement was able to break into the mainstream press, the resulting news coverage reproduced the nation-state's traditional power structure. In contrast, the alternative press challenged the neoliberal economic system, presenting a counter-narrative of community rights and a negligent national government that failed to protect the environment and health of its citizens. In this comparative analysis, I argue that by reframing dominant narratives of economic progress toward community rights and environmental justice, alternative media can act in synergy with environmental justice movements to discursively break a cycle of environmental inequity by collectively reimagining a more sustainable and just future.
waporbuenosaires.org
Based on a probabilistic survey that represented the Colombian urban adult population in 2008, th... more Based on a probabilistic survey that represented the Colombian urban adult population in 2008, this study shows how authoritarian communication patterns as a child are the most important predictor of self-censoring political opinions as an adult. Beyond these early communication experiences, this study also shows how individual differences in terms of socioeconomic status and mass media use contribute to self-censorship. The implications of our results, as well as future research publications, are discussed (article is in Spanish).
Even with access to new media and technological advances such as Web 2.0 expanding globally, a ma... more Even with access to new media and technological advances such as Web 2.0 expanding globally, a majority of people in Latin America still do not have the means to “receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,” as stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Within this increasingly globalized media environment little research has been done on how local, community-based media—such as community radio—function on a transnational level across the borders of nation-states. In Latin America, radio has historically been used in international development and rural education programs, as well by grassroots political movements, to advance social goals. Past research on community radio has focused on case studies of specific stations or national contexts. Expanding on previous scholarship, this case study of the Latin American Association of Radio Education (ALER) examines how the medium, conceptualized as “participatory radio,” functions on a transnational level from a social constructionist theoretical framework. Ten weeks of fieldwork were conducted during the summer of 2008, primarily in Quito, Ecuador. Qualitative methods of in-depth interviews, textual analysis, and participant observation were used to explore the following research questions: 1) What does the ALER executive secretariat say about how participatory radio operates on a transnational level? 2) What are the values and meanings shared by ALER executive secretariat staff members that underlie the organization’s operation and transnational radio production? and 3) What do ALER executive secretariat staff members say about their programming and its impact? Findings show that ALER journalists and other executive secretariat staff members share a common vision of their work, based around five themes: collective self-representations, unity, inclusion, transformation, and adaptation. In addition, it was found that new media technologies are changing production practices and that staff members had a mixed view of the association’s impact. Given that participatory radio will likely continue as a tool in international development programs and transnational social movements, this research advances scholarly knowledge on of how the medium functions on a transnational scale and the shared values underlying such journalistic practice. Recommendations for future research are discussed.
New Media & Society, Jan 1, 2010
Global Media Journal, Jan 1, 2010
Analysis and Comment by Jill Hopke
Following closely on last week’s March for Science, activists are preparing for the People’s Clim... more Following closely on last week’s March for Science, activists are preparing for the People’s Climate March on Saturday, April 29. This event will mark President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office, and comes as the Trump administration is debating whether the United States should continue to participate in the 2015 Paris Agreement on limiting global carbon emissions.
Organizers have worked for over a year to build an intersectional movement that brings together diverse constituencies under the banner of climate justice. They hope to replicate the first People’s Climate March in September 2014, which was the largest climate change mobilization in history.
But surveys show that only about one in five adults in the United States is alarmed about climate change. This means that if climate activists want this march to have a lasting impact, they need to think carefully about how to reach beyond their base.
In Tuesday’s primaries in five northeastern states, Donald Trump – who has voiced support for fra... more In Tuesday’s primaries in five northeastern states, Donald Trump – who has voiced support for fracking as far back as 2012, prior to his presidential bid – swept the Republican field. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – in favor of fracking under some circumstances – won in four states: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
With the front-runners of both parties in support of fracking, even with some conditions, it would seem that anti-fracking activists are fighting an uphill battle.
But on the Democratic side, attention to climate change and fracking during northeast primaries has been prominent, with Senator Bernie Sanders having garnered strong support from anti-fracking activists for his call for a national ban on the technology. And as the primary season has unfolded, Clinton has taken a stronger stance on climate issues, such as banning fossil fuel development on public lands, when pressed by climate activists.
A close look at the political strategies of climate activists reveals a shift in focus to the localized impacts of fossil fuel extraction and a global push to keep fossil fuels in the ground. These changes come at a time of changing views on climate change, energy policy and politics in the U.S. population overall.
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Papers by Jill Hopke
The aggregation of individual divestment campaigns constitutes a movement with shared goals. Divestment can also function as “tactic” to indirectly apply pressure to targets of a movement, such as in the case of the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States. Since 2012, the fossil fuel divestment movement has been gaining traction, first in the United States and United Kingdom, with student-led organizing focused on pressuring universities to divest endowment assets on moral grounds.
In partnership with 350.org, The Guardian launched its Keep it in the Ground campaign in March 2015 at the behest of outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. Within its first year, the digital campaign garnered support from more than a quarter-million online petitioners and won a “campaign of the year” award in the Press Gazette’s British Journalism Awards. Since the launch of The Guardian’s campaign, “keep it in the ground” has become a dominant frame used by fossil fuel divestment activists.
Divestment campaigns seek to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry. The rationale for divestment rests on the idea that fossil fuel companies are financially valued based on their resource reserves and will not be able to extract these reserves with a 2°C or lower climate target. Thus, their valuation will be reduced and the financial holdings become “stranded assets.” Critics of divestment have cited the costs and risks to institutional endowments that divestment would entail, arguing that to divest would go against their fiduciary responsibility. Critics have also argued that divesting from fossil fuel assets would have little or no impact on the industry. Some higher education institutions, including Princeton and Harvard, have objected to divestment as a politicization of their endowments. Divestment advocates have responded to this concern by pointing out that not divesting is not a politically neutral act—it is, in fact, choosing the side of fossil fuel corporations.
communications, most notably email listservs. Findings show that Global Frackdown tweeters engage in framing practices of movement convergence and solidarity, declarative and targeted engagement, prefabricated messaging, and multilingual
tweeting. In contrast to Global Frackdown tweeters’ use of the platform for in-the-moment communication, Global Frackdown activists report in in-depth interviews that they place more emphasis on private (i.e., listservs) communication channels for longer term, durable movement building. The episodic, crowdsourced, and often personalized, transnational
framing practices of Global Frackdown tweeters support core organizers’ goal of promoting the globalness of activism to ban
fracking. This research extends past scholarship on socially mediated activism by providing a case study of how environmental activists use Twitter for ephemeral movement communication during a pre-planned transnational day of action, blurring internal movement collective identity-building and affirmation with publicly enacted strategic framing.
I also examine the movement’s messaging on the social media platform Twitter. Findings show that Global Frackdown tweeters engage in framing practices of: movement convergence and solidarity, declarative and targeted engagement, prefabricated messaging, and multilingual tweeting. Global Frackdown tweeters integrate personal action frames with collective action frames, as well as engage in hybrid framing practices, that I describe as transnational frame jumping. The episodic, loosely-coordinated and often personalized, transnational framing practices of Global Frackdown tweeters support core organizers’ goal of promoting the globalness of activism to ban fracking. Global Frackdown activists use Twitter as a tool to advance the movement and to bolster its moral authority, as well as to forge linkages between localized groups on a transnational scale.
In order to contextualize the anti-hydraulic fracturing social movement within the wider mediated discourse on the shale industry, I also study the relative prominence of negative messaging about shale development in relation to pro-shale messaging on Twitter across five hashtags (#fracking, #globalfrackdown, #natgas, #shale, and #shalegas). I analyze the top actors tweeting using the #fracking hashtag and receiving @mentions with the hashtag. Results show statistically significant differences in the sentiment about shale development across the five hashtags. Results show the discourse on the main contested hashtag #fracking is dominated by activists, both individual activists and organizations. The highest proportion of tweeters posting messages using the hashtag #fracking were individual activists, while the highest proportion of @mention references went to activist organizations. These results suggest hashtags can act as cohesive mediated public spheres within and of themselves. Thus, hashtags can be thought of as reflective of, and formative of, distinct “hashtag publics.”
This study shows that activism against unconventional fossil fuels brings together very localized concerns about environmental risks associated with extractive industries with more abstract global concerns. I conceptualize this type of movement as a translocal environmental movements, which includes the following dimensions: the fusing of material and symbolic concerns, linkages across affected and potentially affected communities in at least two world regions, a sense of shared interests and goals, and the framing of opposition to shale development in terms of both local concerns and global ones.
knowledge of how community radio scales-up to the transnational level and the shared values underlying this journalistic practice.
Analysis and Comment by Jill Hopke
Organizers have worked for over a year to build an intersectional movement that brings together diverse constituencies under the banner of climate justice. They hope to replicate the first People’s Climate March in September 2014, which was the largest climate change mobilization in history.
But surveys show that only about one in five adults in the United States is alarmed about climate change. This means that if climate activists want this march to have a lasting impact, they need to think carefully about how to reach beyond their base.
With the front-runners of both parties in support of fracking, even with some conditions, it would seem that anti-fracking activists are fighting an uphill battle.
But on the Democratic side, attention to climate change and fracking during northeast primaries has been prominent, with Senator Bernie Sanders having garnered strong support from anti-fracking activists for his call for a national ban on the technology. And as the primary season has unfolded, Clinton has taken a stronger stance on climate issues, such as banning fossil fuel development on public lands, when pressed by climate activists.
A close look at the political strategies of climate activists reveals a shift in focus to the localized impacts of fossil fuel extraction and a global push to keep fossil fuels in the ground. These changes come at a time of changing views on climate change, energy policy and politics in the U.S. population overall.
The aggregation of individual divestment campaigns constitutes a movement with shared goals. Divestment can also function as “tactic” to indirectly apply pressure to targets of a movement, such as in the case of the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States. Since 2012, the fossil fuel divestment movement has been gaining traction, first in the United States and United Kingdom, with student-led organizing focused on pressuring universities to divest endowment assets on moral grounds.
In partnership with 350.org, The Guardian launched its Keep it in the Ground campaign in March 2015 at the behest of outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. Within its first year, the digital campaign garnered support from more than a quarter-million online petitioners and won a “campaign of the year” award in the Press Gazette’s British Journalism Awards. Since the launch of The Guardian’s campaign, “keep it in the ground” has become a dominant frame used by fossil fuel divestment activists.
Divestment campaigns seek to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry. The rationale for divestment rests on the idea that fossil fuel companies are financially valued based on their resource reserves and will not be able to extract these reserves with a 2°C or lower climate target. Thus, their valuation will be reduced and the financial holdings become “stranded assets.” Critics of divestment have cited the costs and risks to institutional endowments that divestment would entail, arguing that to divest would go against their fiduciary responsibility. Critics have also argued that divesting from fossil fuel assets would have little or no impact on the industry. Some higher education institutions, including Princeton and Harvard, have objected to divestment as a politicization of their endowments. Divestment advocates have responded to this concern by pointing out that not divesting is not a politically neutral act—it is, in fact, choosing the side of fossil fuel corporations.
communications, most notably email listservs. Findings show that Global Frackdown tweeters engage in framing practices of movement convergence and solidarity, declarative and targeted engagement, prefabricated messaging, and multilingual
tweeting. In contrast to Global Frackdown tweeters’ use of the platform for in-the-moment communication, Global Frackdown activists report in in-depth interviews that they place more emphasis on private (i.e., listservs) communication channels for longer term, durable movement building. The episodic, crowdsourced, and often personalized, transnational
framing practices of Global Frackdown tweeters support core organizers’ goal of promoting the globalness of activism to ban
fracking. This research extends past scholarship on socially mediated activism by providing a case study of how environmental activists use Twitter for ephemeral movement communication during a pre-planned transnational day of action, blurring internal movement collective identity-building and affirmation with publicly enacted strategic framing.
I also examine the movement’s messaging on the social media platform Twitter. Findings show that Global Frackdown tweeters engage in framing practices of: movement convergence and solidarity, declarative and targeted engagement, prefabricated messaging, and multilingual tweeting. Global Frackdown tweeters integrate personal action frames with collective action frames, as well as engage in hybrid framing practices, that I describe as transnational frame jumping. The episodic, loosely-coordinated and often personalized, transnational framing practices of Global Frackdown tweeters support core organizers’ goal of promoting the globalness of activism to ban fracking. Global Frackdown activists use Twitter as a tool to advance the movement and to bolster its moral authority, as well as to forge linkages between localized groups on a transnational scale.
In order to contextualize the anti-hydraulic fracturing social movement within the wider mediated discourse on the shale industry, I also study the relative prominence of negative messaging about shale development in relation to pro-shale messaging on Twitter across five hashtags (#fracking, #globalfrackdown, #natgas, #shale, and #shalegas). I analyze the top actors tweeting using the #fracking hashtag and receiving @mentions with the hashtag. Results show statistically significant differences in the sentiment about shale development across the five hashtags. Results show the discourse on the main contested hashtag #fracking is dominated by activists, both individual activists and organizations. The highest proportion of tweeters posting messages using the hashtag #fracking were individual activists, while the highest proportion of @mention references went to activist organizations. These results suggest hashtags can act as cohesive mediated public spheres within and of themselves. Thus, hashtags can be thought of as reflective of, and formative of, distinct “hashtag publics.”
This study shows that activism against unconventional fossil fuels brings together very localized concerns about environmental risks associated with extractive industries with more abstract global concerns. I conceptualize this type of movement as a translocal environmental movements, which includes the following dimensions: the fusing of material and symbolic concerns, linkages across affected and potentially affected communities in at least two world regions, a sense of shared interests and goals, and the framing of opposition to shale development in terms of both local concerns and global ones.
knowledge of how community radio scales-up to the transnational level and the shared values underlying this journalistic practice.
Organizers have worked for over a year to build an intersectional movement that brings together diverse constituencies under the banner of climate justice. They hope to replicate the first People’s Climate March in September 2014, which was the largest climate change mobilization in history.
But surveys show that only about one in five adults in the United States is alarmed about climate change. This means that if climate activists want this march to have a lasting impact, they need to think carefully about how to reach beyond their base.
With the front-runners of both parties in support of fracking, even with some conditions, it would seem that anti-fracking activists are fighting an uphill battle.
But on the Democratic side, attention to climate change and fracking during northeast primaries has been prominent, with Senator Bernie Sanders having garnered strong support from anti-fracking activists for his call for a national ban on the technology. And as the primary season has unfolded, Clinton has taken a stronger stance on climate issues, such as banning fossil fuel development on public lands, when pressed by climate activists.
A close look at the political strategies of climate activists reveals a shift in focus to the localized impacts of fossil fuel extraction and a global push to keep fossil fuels in the ground. These changes come at a time of changing views on climate change, energy policy and politics in the U.S. population overall.
Before the official summit kicked off, activists held more than 2,300 events in over 175 countries in a Global Climate March, rallying around the shared goal, “Keep fossil fuels in the ground and finance a just transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050.”
Global activism is impressive in scale, but are activists reaching people on social media who are not already supporters of action on climate change?
My analysis of social media after the first week of the summit shows little interaction between climate activists and the industry most closely associated with carbon emissions: oil and gas.