Spaiser, V orcid.org/0000-0002-5892-245X, Nisbett, N and Stefan, CG orcid.org/0000-0002-0706-2082 (2022) “How dare you?” - The Normative Challenge posed by Fridays for Future. PLOS Climate, 1 (10). e0000053. ISSN 2767-3200
Abstract
Meeting the Paris Agreement will require unprecedented social change that goes hand in hand with technological and economic innovations. Research suggests that normative change, the change in what is perceived as normal or morally acceptable, can drive wider large-scale social change, i.e., change in legislation, policy, and behaviour. Normative change often starts with a normative challenge, i.e., practices considered normal, come to be seen as morally repugnant. In this paper we explore the normative challenge posed by Fridays for Future, analysing computationally a large data set of tweets in the context of this protest movement to understand the normative framework that challenges business as usual. We show that Friday for Future’s normative framework makes the shared, unjust casualty experience of young people because of the unmitigated climate crisis accessible to the public. The victims are now in spatial, temporal, and social proximity, they are our children and grandchildren, and this makes the normative challenge of the status quo (continuation of fossil-fuel based economy) so potent. The normative framework references human rights and duty of care when establishing an anti-fossil-fuel norm and prescribes solidarity with climate victims in the Global South, activism and seeking solutions that are based in science.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 Spaiser et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) MR/V021141/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 14 Sep 2022 13:04 |
Last Modified: | 01 Feb 2023 16:53 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Public Library of Science |
Identification Number: | 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000053 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:190905 |