Soros’s soldiers, slackers, and pioneers with no expertise? Discursive exclusion of environmental youth activists from the digital public sphere in Hungary and Czechia

ABSTRACT

Our paper fills the gap in research on online public representations of politically active youth by focusing on the discursive representations of Fridays for Future, a youth-led climate movement, in user generated content in Czechia and Hungary. By employing the childism approach, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the exclusion of youth from the public sphere. Our qualitative analysis identified two exclusionary strategies: 1) normative roles attributed to youth; 2) labeling youth for allegedly holding aberrant values. We stress both similarities and differences in the two countries of Central and Eastern Europe, reflecting this region’s historico-political features.

KEYWORDS:

• digital public sphere
• exclusion
• youth
• activism
• user-generated content
• qualitative content analysis
• childism
• Fridays for Future

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. By using the term “youth” we generally refer to underaged populations, i.e., children and youth under 18, those without the right to vote in the two countries under scrutiny. We keep the term “child/children” only where it stems directly from the empirical data, i.e., in quotations or categories named using the language of the empirical material – “in vivo codes” (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

2. Our study is qualitative in nature, but the frequency analysis we conducted on a smaller sample shows that exclusionary comments were prevalent in the data. Their proportion ranged between 80–90% in both countries if we take only comments dealing with the FFF as a base. Across all comments, this proportion was 45% in Hungary and 65% in the Czech Republic, indicating that unrelated debates and attacks on other actors, especially politicians, are more prevalent in Hungarian discussions.

3. The variety of representations of FFF youth activists was generally smaller in the Hungarian data (a lower number of specific categories of representations was identified), there were also generally fewer comments related to the articles, hence the saturation moment was identified earlier than in the Czech case, where the data were more diverse as concerns various representations.

4. To meet ethical standards, we did not use authors’ names when citing comments in our paper; furthermore, translating the citations into English makes it basically impossible to link individual comments to discussants’ identities.

5. In this context, Bennett (1998) refers to lifestyle politics, typical especially for the younger generations, wherein the declining interest in conventional politics is replaced by the tendency of individuals to see political meanings in their everyday lifestyle choices.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Charles University under Grant number: PRIMUS/21/HUM/003

Notes on contributors

Lenka Vochocová

Lenka Vochocová (corresponding author) is researcher and lecturer at the Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Czech Republic. Her research interests cover the fields of gender media studies, online political participation, public sphere theories and political economy of communication.

Jana Rosenfeldová

Jana Rosenfeldová is researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Czech Republic. In her research she focuses on political communication and online political participation.

Anna Vancsó

Anna Vancsó is research fellow at Charles University of Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences and an assistant research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her main research interests are the transformation of the contemporary public sphere, with special focus on the role of online media in representing and shaping social realities.

Annamária Neag

Annamária Neag is a research fellow at Charles University, where she is leading an international research group that studies the civic engagement of children and youth (under 18-year-olds) and the skills needed for digital activism.