Understanding Collective Identity in Virtual Spaces: A Study of the Youth Climate Movement

How does collective identity form in virtual spaces and what role do hashtags play? This paper takes advantage of a unique dataset that includes surveys from activists who organized the nationally coordinated climate strikes in the US that began in spring 2019 to answer these questions. Building on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills) Vol. 66; no. 9; pp. 1286 - 1308
Main Authors Nasrin, Sohana, Fisher, Dana R.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.08.2022
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Activism
Activists
Climate change
Group identity
Identity formation
Internet
Narratives
Question answer sequences
Social movements
Social network analysis
Strikes
Youth
Youth movements
protest
collective identity
activism
climate change
climate movement
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Summary:How does collective identity form in virtual spaces and what role do hashtags play? This paper takes advantage of a unique dataset that includes surveys from activists who organized the nationally coordinated climate strikes in the US that began in spring 2019 to answer these questions. Building on the research about collective identity formation online and the role that hashtags play, we employ social network analysis to assess how collective identity forms online over three waves of protests. In particular, we analyze how activists involved in the youth climate movement used hashtags to project their collective identities and create collective narratives. Our findings show how hashtags use varied over the period of our study, in some cases indicating the formation of a thin collective identity. They also show that there are patterns in the ways hashtags are employed by activists in the movement that suggest the formation of subaltern narratives among those affiliated with youth-led groups. Our paper concludes by considering how this finding helps us understand collective identity in virtual spaces and the role that hashtags play more specifically within social movements.
ISSN:0002-7642
1552-3381
DOI:10.1177/00027642211056257