Research Seminar: Environmental Activism and Digital Communication: Scaling, Space, and the Limits of Transnational Solidarity

The talk explores how digital communication shapes environmental activism across local, national, and transnational levels, sometimes undermining rather than strengthening transnational solidarity

In times of global climate change, the use of digital technologies in movement activism raises new questions about space, scale, and agency. Although social media create opportunities to connect locally rooted environmental conflicts with transnational publics, scaling processes take different forms and are neither automatic nor unidirectional. Digital movement communication is also shaped by activists’ spatial contexts, lifeworlds, and values, as well as by the relationships between movement organizations operating at local, national, and global levels. Drawing on case studies from Germany, Turkey, and Israel, I discuss how scaling shapes protest communication, but also generates tensions between national and global movement organizations. I argue that digital technologies can have dysfunctional consequences for environmental activism, potentially undermining transnational solidarity in the fight against climate change.

Barbara Pfetsch is Professor Emerita at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and Principal Investigator in the research group “Dynamics of Digital Mobilization” at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. Her research focuses on comparative political communication, transnational and European public spheres, issue networks, social movements, and digital political communication.