Media Matters in Civic Education
networks, materiality, & youth-led climate action
Sernhede, Saralie
2026
In 2018, thousands of young people around the world left their classrooms to strike for the climate (de Moor, et al., 2021), formulating societal critique against governments and the adult world in general in terms of their refusal to act on the climate crisis. An accompanying critique was directed at the institution of education, which was evident through their action of striking from school for the climate and continuously embedded in movement messaging, posing the question: Are we studying for a future that does not exist?
Now in 2026, the Swedish youth-led climate movement remains a network of such critique, organizing protest activities such as demonstrations and strikes as well as educational contexts such as workshops, seminar series, and study circles. With an interest in the role of education in fostering active citizens in contemporary media society, the aim of this thesis is to understand the role of media materialities in assembling the youth-led climate movement as a format for alternative forms of civic education, where subjectification and the emergence of citizens are not shaped by formalized curricula and educational environments but through protest and resistance.
Methodologically, the study draws on ethnographic fieldwork that is a hybrid across the online and offline (Hine, 2008), multi-sited (Marcus, 1995), and visually oriented (Pink, 2011), deploying observations in both physical and digital settings as well as interviews with activists. Theoretically this study brings together a socio-material and relational approach, found particularly in actor-network theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005; Law, 2007) with educational and political theory centered on action and subjectification (Biesta, 2010, 2014, 2022; Arendt, 1958, 1961; Dewey, 1916/2001).
The analysis identifies four interrelated processes through which educational relations take shape and, in turn, configure the material relations of the movement: arrival, inquiry, production, and disruption. These processes are further demonstrated to be fundamentally embedded in resistance and imbued with educational risk (Biesta, 2022). Together, these findings inform a protest media literacy — namely, a distributed and continually reconfigured capacity for knowing and acting through media in civic resistance. The thesis thus identifies an alternative civic education that does not prepare young people for future participation through predetermined outcomes but rather takes shape through participation itself.
Huddinge : Södertörns högskola, 2026. s. 269.
ISBN 978-91-89962-92-7
Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations, 1652-7399; 266
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