Affektive Praktiken im digitalen Klimaaktivismus

The protest practice of blocking roads by sticking to asphalt has brought the activist organization ›Last Generation‹ a great deal of attention, especially in 2023, and caused avery emotional public debate. The term ›Klimakleber‹,coined in this context, bundles rejection and indignation about the disruption of public life but is directly appropriated and used by the Last Generation itself to generate attention for the urgency of its cause. In our article, we examine how the hashtag #klimakleber translates this affective structure into image programmatics and algorithmic logics on TikTok. We choose the platform because the affective dynamics become particularly clear here and we describe the forms of interaction around the hashtag #klimakleber as an ›affective arrangement‹. We argue that (digital) activist practices surrounding the term ›Klimakleber‹ are characterized by an affective ambiguity, in which activists, car drivers, politicians, journalists, protesters and counter-protesters intertwine to form a social figuration. We connect this ambiguity with image aesthetics and platform logics ofthe examined videos by using the term ›tipping figure‹. Following the concept of climatic and social tipping points, which is central to the climate movement and denotes irrevocable turning points of an undesired biophysical change or a desired mobilization, the concept of the ›tipping figure‹ focuses on an oscillation between different views, a tilting back and forth of possible interpretations. We use this term to shed light on the media figuration of the hashtag #klimakleber and its ambiguity as an activist operator.

This paper reports on affective positioning in online discourse on sustainable menstruation practices. Social media, specifically the video-sharing platform YouTube, provides users a space to share their lives, knowledge, and opinions through dynamic multimodal interaction. Through strategic positioning, users can construct, maintain, and negotiate their own identity and belonging within digital communities of practice. This paper taps into the intersection of such positioning as it is expressed in video and comment sections framed within sustainability and climate emergency discourse. The data are based on vlogs explicitly themed around sustainable menstruation and menstruation products. Platform affordances enabling affective stancetaking are investigated and, using corpus-assisted micro analysis, applied to salient shared beliefs across German and English-speaking communities. Observations show that audiences, through sharing personal experiences, collaboratively negotiate their adherence to presupposed sustainable norms as set by the content creators. Further, findings show that sustainable norms intersect with other positionings, such as political activism, gendered interpretations of communities of practice, and visibility in public discourse. Sustainability discourse, it appears, allows for otherwise socially sanctioned positioning, such as the telling of intimate or taboo subjects, to be articulated as it establishes the community within shared values.

The article explores digital climate activism beyond well-known platforms like Twitter/X, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, where activism is shaped by specific algorithms and constraints like character limits. In contrast, this study focuses on digital climate activism within the realm of online blogs—an infrastructure that currently receives less attention. Blogs offer unique opportunities, aside from their archival function,for narrating stories about the Anthropocene and linking these stories with others. The article analyzes blog posts to expand the concept of ecological storytelling,drawing on new materialisms, to include non-human entities such as plants, animals, and ecological processes. This form of storytelling is conceptualized as everyday, precarious, and affective relationship work, which alters existing connections, brings forth new ones, and tests them. The article focuses on the encounter, the description of cross-species relational work, affective responses, and Green Emotions, as well as the imagination of alternative,ecological, and posthuman relationships.

Greta Thunberg is a prominent figure in the public debate on climate change. She not only gives a face to the youth movement «Fridays for Future”, but has also become a figurative – albeit controversial – point of reference in the worldwide debate on how to deal with climate change. Her communicative function for public self-understanding and the affective references to her show that Greta Thunberg can be seen as a social figure through which ›burning issues‹ of contemporary society are negotiated. This means not only ecological issues, but also the relationship between democracy and activism, the generational question, and – equally important – the relationship between humans and nature. The aim of this article is to understand the ways in which ecological issues are figuratively discussed within the public debate. Therefore, we analyze forms of person-related representations with three approaches: through social figures, in order to capture the social issues involved; by deepening the analyses through an art historical perspective, focusing on the aesthetic formulas and the media forms involved;and through the focus on affective dynamics.

Climate change has become a central topic in contemporary societal debates, often emphasizing the urgent need for collective action by mobilizing emotional categories. One measure individuals can take to beneft Earth’s climate is to limit practices that produce greenhouse gases, but it is largely unknown whether this willingness to self-restrict translates into actual behavior. This paper addresses this question through an audiovisual study in which participants are presented with a fctional Instagram post discussing the link between smartphone use and greenhouse gas emissions. Using conversation analysis, the data reveal that despite a high theoretical willingness to restrict their media consumption for the sake of the climate, participants experienced cognitive-emotional dissonance in practice. This can be understood through psychological reactance theory, in which efforts to raise awareness about climate change paradoxically result in negative behavioral responses. Consistent with this theory, participants seek strategies to restore their personal free-dom by reframing the situation to regain their sense of agency and minimize personal implications to mitigate feelings of reactance.