News coverage of the School Strike for Climate movement in Australia: the politics of representing young strikers’ emotions

Since mid-2018, school students across the world have been leading mass strikes to demand strengthened political action on climate change. This article 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. The analysis works with a corpus of 500 articles published in Australian national, state (New South Wales and Victoria), and a select sample of regional and rural newspapers. The corpus is read with affective-discursive attunement to historical representations of children and young people, the politics of emotion, and contemporary media representational politics surrounding climate justice activism. Four dominant characterisations of the young strikers are analysed: ignorant zealots, anxious pawns, rebellious truants, and extraordinary heroes. Alongside these characterisations, we consider how young people speak back to these characterisations, and draw implications for future research with young climate justice activists.