Social media has generated new opportunities while also presenting unique challenges for social movement organizing. In the case of youth climate movements, social media has allowed for activists to organize transnationally, reach substantial audiences, and find new pathways towards institutional political influence. As part of their strategic use of social media platforms, certain youth activists have gained new degrees of internet celebrity while others, I contend, have been largely erased from narratives celebrating global youth climate activism. These inequitable dynamics at the intersection of new media and social movement organizing demand that we pay attention to attention to attention itself as a key dimension and outcome of organizing efforts. It is critical also to interrogate who obtains attention and who does not and to ask why.

As an effort to rebalance the distribution of attention, and speak to the longer histories and broader geographies of contemporary youth climate activism, this ongoing research project uses ArcGIS Storymaps Platform to develop

My piece in Edge Effects offers a more elaborated framing of this research area.