Public defence of doctoral thesis with Saralie Sernhede, Media and Communication Studies

Saralie Sernhede defends her thesis ”Media Matters in Civic Education: Networks, Materiality, & Youth-Led Climate Action”.

Subject: Media and Communication Studies
Research area: Studies in the Educational Sciences
Doctoral School: School, Sport, Screen
External reviewer: Lina Rahm, Docent, History of Science, Technology & Environment, KTH
Language: English

Abstract
In 2018, thousands of young people around the world left their classrooms to strike for the climate (de Moor, et al., 2021). In the years that followed, a globally networked and youth-led climate movement developed. As social movements often do, the youth-led climate movement arose at the nexus of various crisis narratives (see Castells, 2015; Kaun, 2016), not least 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, this study looks beyond formal schooling to explore spaces of youth-organized civic education in which young people themselves practice citizenship in action. In doing so, this investigation emerges in the gap between previous research that acknowledges the central role of media in the organization of civic life (Dahlgren, 2009; Bennet & Segerberg, 2012; Mortensen, et al., 2019) and research that highlights the educational opportunities offered by social movements in general (e.g., Bennett & McWhorter, 2019; Kilgore, 1999; Stephen- sen & Treré, 2020) and youth-led climate movements in particular (e.g., Green, 2020; Biswas & Mattheis, 2021; Jergus & Schmidt, 2023).

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. This ambition is realized through description and analysis of the youth-led climate movement as a network of human and material actors, with a particular focus on civic and protest media, their use, production, and literacy.

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 adopts a socio-material and relational approach, found particularly in actor-network theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005; Law, 2007), to trace assembled figurations of civic education and the active citizen in the youth-led climate movement in Sweden. Drawing on ANT research in media and communication studies (Spöhrer, 2016; Teurlings, 2013), as well as research on education and protest in relation to technology (Feigenbaum, 2014; Sørensen, 2009), a broadened conceptualization of media is adopted to grasp the entanglement of heterogenous entities and the work they do to assemble networks. Alongside this post-ANT approach (Blok et al., 2020), the analysis further engages with educational and political theorists such as Gert Biesta (2010; 2014; 2022), Hannah Arendt (1958; 1961), and John Dewey (1916/2001), bringing together discussions concerning the relationship between schooling and democracy, between young people and politics, as well as between resistance and education. Between these traditions, a framework centered on “civic action” and “civic knowledge work” is developed as set within networks that bring together not only the work of human actors but that of non-humans as well.

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.

Keywords: civic education, youth-led climate activism, networked social movements, protest media, civic media literacy, media materialities, civic action, subjectification, actor-network theory.