Introduction

Children and young people continue to engage with and co-create digital spaces to achieve their personal and collective goals, in extraordinary as well as everyday contexts, from protesting against environmental injustices to building social networks. At the same time, climate action in Australia is facilitated by entanglements of the digital with non-digital spaces, enabled by lands and waters that form Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Country. One growing and important example of both digital world making and climate action is School Strike 4 Climate Australia (SS4C), which involves children and young people working across digital and non-digital spaces to advocate for safer futures. Based on a close analysis of the digital environmental activism produced by a SS4C 15 October 2021 event, this chapter considers the entanglement of digital and non-digital actors, and what this says about co-belonging with ecologies, Country, and place.

The digital affords the capacity to bring together diffuse SS4C events that have been, and are, held across large spaces, while also supporting the social networks that enable the movement. Digital geographies of the movement are produced by the reporting of place-based protests and descriptions that visually and textually record who engages, where they are situated, and why they are participating. Digital renderings of the strikes and rallies enable a sense of solidarity across vast distances and somewhat countervails Australia’s relatively low population density. Further, digital spaces articulate relations between multiple scales of climate action, linking local, state, and national iterations with a global social movement of children and young people striking for climate action.

While Australian federal governments have been slow to take effective climate action, children and young people’s grassroots movements that tap into global climate action campaigns are still growing. The SS4C in Australia is inspired by Greta Thunberg’s leadership and associated international campaigns to build climate action momentum. Power and resistance are a strong part of these expressions of discontent and they foreshadow an alternative future in which children and young people’s desire for sustainable worlds is digitally and non-digitally writ large.

A digital ecologies approach is used in this chapter to analyse the SS4C movement, a climate activist group driven by children and young people creatively making digital and non-digital spaces to address Australian and global environmental crises. The digital content that SS4C creates works to coordinate, record, and amplify the in-person strikes and rallies, and is curated with a view to building solidarity and working towards justice in a framework of co-belonging. Importantly, SS4C centres Indigenous knowledges and argues for climate justice in compelling ways: from starting events with acknowledgements and welcomes to Country to including calls for Indigenous sovereignty within campaign actions, SS4C aims to undermine settler colonial power.

The question that this chapter sets out to answer is: what does the SS4C demonstrate about children and young people working towards reparative digital worlds to counter Australian and global climate crises? By analysing digital data in the lead up to and just after a SS4C event in late 2021, a picture of the aims and qualities of the movement emerges that contributes to our understanding of diverse digital geographies. This chapter offers an analysis of one small part of an international social movement that works with entangled digital and non-digital spaces to foster effective environmental activism.¹

By examining the role of place and Country in the digital spaces created by SS4C, evidence of how co-belonging is generated within an exciting movement emerges, showing how young people are doing substantial work in seeking better climate governance and reparative futures. We build on recent research on SS4C here to show how co-belonging partly shapes the movement and suggest future research pathways that may extend this digital geographic scholarship.² Our positionality contributes to our analysis in this chapter; Jess McLean is parent to a boy who attended the first SS4C event in Sydney in 2018 and is white Australian. Lara Newman is a teacher and academic of diverse heritage who has attended several SS4C events.

Perspectives on repair, connecting to place, and the digital

Inspired in part by the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham,³ this chapter offers an analysis of repair in action that is emerging from this social movement. One question that guided Gibson-Graham’s work was whether humans could reimagine economies as co-belonging with, and constituted by, ecologies, Country, and place. As we show in this chapter, the SS4C includes calls for action that are grounded in place, centre Country, and seek more sustainable environmental futures. We use a digital ecologies lens to illuminate the ways in which this particular environmental movement emphasises place and Country, as children and young people imagine different environmental futures.

We understand Country as describing a particular area belonging to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and to which they belong, and that it includes animate and inanimate entities. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ connections to Country may include cultural practices, knowledge, songs, stories, art, non-human life, atmosphere, and waterways.⁴ Country is a living thing for which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people care, and which cares for them. The authors of this chapter learn from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples about what Country means and how it relates to climate justice.⁵ In this context, digital environmental activism that centres Country is one way to articulate connections to place and ecology within Australia.

Digital ecologies, co-belonging, and repair

As an approach, digital ecologies has its conceptual roots within media studies scholarship, along with multiple related metaphors including ‘communication ecology’ and ‘media ecology’, to theorise connections between media and social movements and to capture the complexity in relationships between both spheres. For example, Treré and Mattoni argue that a ‘media ecological lens’ enables us to understand the communicative complexity within social movements and the media that they employ.⁶ The media ecological lens encompasses a diversity of metaphors and these are variably used to explain different theoretical positions and approaches. In research on digital food activism, Giraud uses a communication ecologies lens to analyse interventions targeting multinational food chains,⁷ including the tensions between the political goals of such social movements and the use of corporatised digital media. Earlier, Taffel offered a constructive analysis of digital media ecology as forged by entangled scalar relations, emphasising materialist concerns within media studies.⁸ Digital media is a focus for Pickerill,⁹ who notes how Movement Intellectuals leading environmental activism can ‘advocate new ways of viewing and utilising technology – to those within the movement and the general public – ways that might contradict with commercial desires for the technology’. It is within this broad context of digital environmental activism scholarship that this case study sits.

The term ‘digital ecology’ emerges from two strands of research according to Lyle et al.:¹⁰ one tending to use digital ecologies as an overarching term for digital–human interactions and the other grounded in digital design within pedagogical literature. For the purposes of this chapter, we take digital ecologies to refer to an approach that considers how digital technologies can potentially deepen the ties between humans and more-than-human lifeworlds in generative ways.¹¹ More-than-human geographic scholarship of the digital is emphasising how digital devices are co-producing environments. For example, Prebble et al. show how smart urban forests are governed in Australia at the local government scale with a policy and document analysis of current digital governance initiatives;¹² this research found that digital interventions of urban forests reinforce and reproduce Western values of nature. Decentring humans is a distant possibility in many smart urban forest practices but Gabrys invites us to do just that and think about how forests walk.¹³ Non-human agency is foregrounded in this recent digital and more-than-human geographic research. Indeed, multiple forms of agency have been studied in social movement studies for some time, expanding the focus on individual human and collective agency to other agents of change. For example, Feigenbaum considers non-human actors as key components of the Occupy Movement, ranging from ‘the signboard-ready flat surfaces of a canvas marquee to the atmospheric quality of tear gas’.¹⁴ Nature is tangentially included in Feigenbaum’s analysis in the form of grass playing a role in the tent assemblage. By extending this earlier decentring of the human with analysis of Country as a powerful actor in digitally mediated social movements, we hope to continue this conversation on agency.

Digital ecologies captures the interplay and interconnections between ‘natural’ spaces and data. Morey succinctly argues that ‘Nature is digital’ in their chapter entitled Digital Ecologies for an edited collection on ecology and new media.¹⁵ The compartmentalisation and atomisation of nature in much of modernist thinking is the target of Morey’s claim that ‘the modern’ has warped and reduced nature. Connecting nature with digital technologies via framing these as digital ecologies can open up and challenge this reductionism according to Morey, and we found this perspective productive in our analysis of SS4C.

More recently, Nost and Goldstein introduce a special issue on the political ecology of data with a prescient claim that it is only by understanding digital technologies – including platforms, devices, and the institutions that make up digital ecosystems – that we can understand where we are at in terms of global environmental governance.¹⁶ A Special Issue for Digital Geography and Society on ‘Digital Natures’ also examines how digital technologies and practices reshape how nature is conceptualised and invites political critiques of these transformations.¹⁷ Digital geography scholars are examining human, nature, and digital technological relations and offering conceptual and empirical tools in ways that help us understand our digital worlds.¹⁸ We suggest that the connections and disconnections between digital geographies and digital ecologies literatures are yet to be fully conceptualised: the two research approaches share significant common ground and future theoretical work could examine this terrain.

Building on J.K. Gibson-Graham’s thinking on repair in the Anthropocene, this chapter analyses a social movement that is seeking transformation and offers an examination of the social media that is entangled with in-person strikes that remake co-belonging. Gibson-Graham focus on the regional scale in their thinking on a feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene. They exhort us to reimagine economies as co-belonging with, and constituted by, ecologies, Country, and place, rather than continuing damaging extractive modes of production and consumption. This chapter takes up their challenge and adopts a multi-scaled perspective to show how place is important in grounding the SS4C in the digital, while also connecting to global social movements and confronting this global environmental issue. Gibson-Graham consider co-belonging in the Anthropocene with a regional emphasis, and we build on this framing to think about repair via children and young people’s digital activism. Repair may be facilitated by climate action – especially in Australia where so much remains to be done on this front – and plays a key role in realigning human and non-human relations for alternative futures.

Research on SS4C and children and young people’s digital environmental activism

Research on digital platforms and how young people are experiencing, and resisting, climate change has shown that the digital is a primary avenue for ‘affectively and politically staging this problem’.¹⁹ Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles started a research project in northern New South Wales prior to the emergence of SS4C, studying how a climate change education app might facilitate young people’s agency with respect to climate action. They situate their findings in relation to SS4C and describe it as a globally theatrical political movement, drawing on Deleuzian concepts of affect and differentiation.

Recent research specifically on SS4C includes consideration of citizenship deployment as part of the movement, the role of emotion and affect in SS4C, and how adults are responding to children and young people’s protests, but it does not examine the digital geographies of the movement. Before March 2020, when physical distancing and prohibitions of large mass gatherings were made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, five large School Strike 4 Climate events were held around Australia, supported by digital actions.²⁰ Analysing how students are engaging in activism, Collin and Matthews describe the SS4C Australian movement in detail from that time, and argue that it is an example of students renegotiating citizenship.²¹ Their chapter examines the event on 20 September 2019 that was facilitated by SS4C and draws on surveys with protestors at the time as well as soon after the event. The surveys were complemented by mainstream media analysis and participant observation. Like earlier SS4C events in Australia, the 2019 SS4C event started with a Welcome to Country, this time by Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, Gadigal Traditional Owner, and her daughter, Nadeena Dixon.²² Beginning the SS4C with this protocol is important as it centres Indigenous knowledges in climate justice efforts.

Social and climate justice are an ongoing focus for SS4C leaders and participants. In a survey of SS4C participants, Collin and Matthews found that participants ‘were mainly motivated to attend the protest “to put pressure on politicians to make things change,” “raise public awareness,” and “express solidarity”’.²³ By emphasising citizenship in their analysis of the 2019 SS4C, Collin and Matthews counter the denigration of this emergent social movement by politicians in Australia who were against the political action and outline the ethical framing of SS4C participants by documenting the event. Our chapter builds on Collin and Matthews’ offering by examining the SS4C held in late 2021 and the digital activism that enabled, and was intertwined with, the in-person gatherings to produce compelling social movements.

Pedagogical research has included analysis of the dynamics of the SS4C and what it means for education in Australia.²⁴ Alexander et al. examine how adults framed the protest in mainstream media and categorised these as protectionist narratives or anticipatory narratives.²⁵ Anticipatory narratives involve asserting that children should be in school and that strikes are inappropriate activities for them to pursue, while protectionist narratives tend to claim that children should be shielded from the political adult world so they are not harmed by the harsh realities therein. Whether anticipatory or protectionist, the fact that SS4C persists demonstrates the commitment to alternative futures that young people in Australia (and elsewhere) seek. Indeed, Verlie and Flynn describe school strikers as themselves becoming climate change educators, in a prefigurative sense, by organising and enacting the climate strikes.²⁶ In contributing to this burgeoning research on children and young people’s activism, this chapter offers a digital ecologies perspective on co-belonging within SS4C.

Methodology

Digital methods were used to collect data about SS4C social media activities during a strike event. Drawing on Rogers,²⁷ we examined quantitative and qualitative aspects of the posts that involved organising and then amplifying the event. Data collection focused on the lead-up to, and aftermath of, an Australian School Strike for Climate action held on 15 October 2021. Empirical data were collected from social media accounts in the week leading up to and immediately after this event. The content analysis of this material included noting:

• the type of post (inviting attendance/reporting participation/political critique/outcome of strike action);
• the geographical location of the post;
• the scope of strike action (including an estimate of the number of participants);
• a record of the sort of engagement with the post (number of likes/comments/shares);
• and a sample standout comment/response.

This data collection focused on the national Twitter account for School Strike for Climate in Australia and the Instagram Sydney-based and national accounts for New South Wales (NSW) data (as the official NSW page was only set up after the 15 October strike). The Sydney account tended to focus on the NSW-wide digital strike. National accounts for both Twitter and Instagram contain content from most Australian states and territories; there wasn’t much identified as being from the Australian Capital Territory or Victoria, although we understand that some of the photos were from those strikes. A lot of the smaller SS4C social media accounts have been inactive since May 2021 or earlier, probably due to COVID-19 related lockdowns, so there wasn’t much content regarding the 15 October strikes on those accounts.

Following this data collection process, data analysis involved coding for significant themes and processes that shape digital action, using a summative and direct content analysis approach.²⁸ In terms of summative content analysis, we examined word frequency of key words related to digital climate action including young people, protest, hope, future, change, Australia, fossil free, Morrison (for then Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison). Direct content analysis drew on themes raised from previous research in young people’s digital climate action.²⁹ The data were analysed according to the following dimensions: the scope and scale of the climate action; the demands put forward by the participants; and the themes that shaped the actions. The co-belonging – between protestors, Country, and the digital – that emerges from this analysis is partial rather than a complete representation of the event.

Tracking children and young people making place and acknowledging Country on SS4C social media

SS4C Australia and Sydney Instagram accounts

From the SS4C’s national Instagram account, there was significant diversity in engagement between types of posts. Political critique of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison received the largest engagement. Inviting attendance to in-person events received moderate engagement. For example, this post on the SS4C Instagram account had nearly 3,000 likes: ‘Scott Morrison’s voting record is clear. He just could not care less about our futures It is so important that we make our voices clear and say enough is enough! Join us on October 15 for the National #ClimateStrike! RSVP to your local in-person or online action at: ss4c.info/oct15 #TheYouthAreRising #ClimateStrike #ClimateCrisis #ScottMorrison #WhatACOPOut’.

There were fewer posts on Instagram than on Twitter; however, the national Instagram account posts generally received far more comments and likes than the Twitter account’s posts, and more than the NSW/Sydney Instagram account. Posts of memes tended to attract a substantial number of likes. Instagram was strategically used for organising and promotion in the lead-up to 15 October, and to encourage engagement and action on the day – approximately 40% of posts were from 10 to 14 October, 40% were on the day of strike (15 October), 20% were after the strike (16–20 October). Similar styles and branding were used across posts – yellow and purple featured as text colours, tints over images, and in backgrounds of posts on Twitter and Instagram. Posts prior to 15 October focused on engaging politicians, participating on social media, and preparing resources for the strike. The national account posted content on strikes all over the continent.

The Sydney Instagram account tended to focus on NSW-wide action rather than remaining Sydney specific (the official NSW Instagram page was set up after the 15 October), extending the geographical presence of SS4C beyond the largest city in the state. Likes tended to be higher for posts inviting attendance at the digital NSW action. Most posts were sharing content from the national Instagram or Twitter accounts. Overall, the majority of posts (45%) were invites, followed by reporting participation (31%), outcome of strike action (17%), and political critique (8%). The digital is therefore crucial in facilitating participation and engagement for SS4C.

In terms of content relating to Indigenous knowledges in these Instagram accounts, the Queensland rally was particularly interesting. Posts from that SS4C event acknowledged that young people and other Queenslanders are resisting climate inaction and First Nations people have led this resistance of poor governance and settler colonial power for hundreds of years. Extending the articulation of resistance to environmental devastation beyond the immediate climate crisis shows the depth of SS4C understanding with respect to the agents responsible for the Anthropocene.

SS4C Australian Twitter account

Content of Twitter stories on the SS4C Australian account varied in the lead up to, during, and after the 15 October strike. There were fewer tweets in the lead up to 15 October than posts on Instagram. Use of Twitter seemed to focus on political critique and reporting engagement on 15 October, while Instagram focused more on planning and engagement prior to the event. It is worth noting here that SS4C’s different strategies create a decentralised but still cohesive ‘collective actor’, resonant with media studies scholarship that establishes how collectives have been created in different activist settings such as the Occupy Movement (for example Kavada).³⁰

On 15 October, the SS4C national Twitter account was populated by many tweets from the movement and retweets of articles from major news outlets, as well as from supporters such as unions, parent groups, Greens and Labor politicians, business people, and other climate action groups in Australia and one from India. This may indicate an extensive network of adults allied with the student movement and seems to be reflective of a deliberate attempt to make that support visible to politicians and media.

There were more reposts of others’ content relating to SS4C on Twitter than on Instagram, especially on the day of the strike. The hashtags #ClimateStrike and #theyoutharerising, as well as the topic ‘Morrison’ were trending on 15 October. A small percentage (21%) of tweets were invites, which predominantly appeared prior to 15 October, or early on in the Twitter feed. Tweets reporting outcomes of strike action made up only 5% of tweets and featured during or after 15 October. Political critique (36%) and reporting attendance (39%) made up the majority of tweets. Some tweets contained content from multiple categories (for example, political critique and reporting attendance). Political critique focused heavily on Scott Morrison, with occasional references to liberal member Sussan Ley (then Minister of the Environment at the federal level), the National Party (a conservative political party), and the Queensland Labor party (a political party that aims to support equality).

Reports of attendance were celebratory tweets, with some political critique and references to voting politicians out or ‘voting climate’ at the May 2022 federal government election. Most comments on Twitter associated with SS4C and the strike event were in support of it and the students; however, there were more unsupportive or critical comments on Twitter than on Instagram. Some tweets were also featured on Instagram indicating the strategic and sophisticated quality of social media and community engagement by SS4C. There were far fewer images and videos on Twitter than on Instagram, reflecting the affordances of both platforms.

Examining particular strikes and how they are shared on these social media feeds provides insights into how Country, place, and ecologies are fundamental components of the overarching SS4C movement. For instance, SS4C named the Meanjin/Brisbane Strike (in Queensland) as such in a deliberate move to highlight Aboriginal sovereignty. ‘Meanjin’ is the Jagera and Turrbal peoples’ traditional name for the Brisbane area,³¹ and while the Aboriginal custodians of the land and many others frequently use this name, it is not often used as the first name for the city. Inverting its order – naming the strike as in Meanjin/Brisbane rather than Brisbane/Meanjin – is a conscious strategy to undermine colonial naming practices. Approximately 3,000 people participated in the Meanjin/Brisbane Strike and a long video was shared on the SS4C feed of a young person giving a speech and leading chants, accompanied by an adult Auslan (sign language of Australia) interpreter. One chant that started the event was ‘Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land’, capturing how integral recognition of Indigenous sovereignty is for SS4C.

After this video post, SS4C share another video of a student striker giving a speech on the need for creating space for inclusion of ‘diverse’ and ‘BIPOC’ people (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour), and calling for a focus on their voices in climate activism. This speaker discussed how climate justice requires racial justice, respect for intersectionality, and that we need to have conversations about giving land back to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, working to achieve environmental justice and ending climate apartheid. One comment in response to this video was ‘Climate Justice is Racial Justice, what a powerful speech!!!’

Other strike events around Australia aimed to centre Country in meaningful ways. The SS4C event in Tasmania named the location of the event as Indigenous Country: ‘NIPALUNA HOBART OCT 15 STRIKE Live footage from Nipaluna the youth are rising strike ’. Nipaluna is the Indigenous name for the place that settler colonial structures label as Hobart. In Sydney, posts mentioned ‘Warrang/Sydney’ as the location for striking, again centring Indigenous place names.

SS4C as grounded in place, ecology, and Country

Children and young people involved in SS4C are using digital platforms to express their political agency and work against apathy on climate change. Connected to the international movement of school strikes, Australia’s SS4C is grounded in place and centres Indigenous ways of knowing and protocols in their digital and in-person activities to cultivate a strong sense of co-belonging.

The energy, enthusiasm, and spirit of the SS4C is evident in the event studied here, and in previous strikes, both in the digital amplification and organisation of the event and the strikes on the ground. The colourful gatherings, the powerful speeches, the effective posters, the slogans at strike actions, all reflect a motivated and organised collective who are committed to generating change – and are having fun while doing so. The SS4C movement continues to build momentum, even when pandemic lockdown conditions made digital protests the only feasible option, and in the face of despair about inaction on climate crises.³²

Joining social movements and engendering solidarity has been shown to promote stronger mental health among participants of protest movements, including social media-driven feminist movements.³³ In the context of climate action, Trott has shown how participation in youth-led climate action in the United States helped children feel more positive about the state of the world,³⁴ and this reflects the atmospheres captured in digital presences of SS4C. The strikers in this case study come together with anger, hope, enthusiasm, despair, humour, and kindness. We could think here of participants ‘bearing worlds’, as Verlie proposes in her pedagogical work on climate anxiety,³⁵ which involves enduring and encountering difficult climate realities now while simultaneously building collectives to make more tolerable futures.

Digital ecologies, as an emerging research area, may benefit from drawing on Gibson-Graham’s invitation to think about co-belonging in terms of place and ecologies, helping us to ground lived realities of global environmental dilemmas such as climate change. To return to the question set out at the beginning of this chapter, how are children and young people digitally asserting co-belonging to, and with, their places and ecologies in the context of the SS4C? While they rallied in their towns and cities in discrete groups, a sense of unification was generated by digital connections, and these relations will likely be an important feature of future events. The affordances of social media are an especially crucial component of SS4C in this nation that has low population density and persists as a climate action laggard.³⁶

The audience for SS4C goes beyond children and young people as the data gathered from primary social media accounts managed by the movement leaders demonstrate. A key theme was ‘voting climate’ at the studied event, which is clearly impossible for many participants as they are under the current Australian legal voting age of eighteen. The SS4C’s demonstration of active citizenship, despite a lack of capacity to realise this citizenship in a formal vote at an election, is indicative of the strategic qualities of the social movement and corroborates with Collin and Matthews’ research.³⁷ With the benefit of hindsight, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that SS4C most likely played a role in the Liberal Party’s loss of the Australian 2022 federal election, which was made possible by a significant wave of support for climate action independents and a solid climate policy from the victorious Labor Party.

Nuanced political engagement of the sort captured on the Twitter account for SS4C shows the sophistication of the movement. For example, the then Prime Minister Scott Morrison-related tweets and Instagram posts received the most engagement by followers and yet this is not the extent of the political targets chosen by SS4C. For context, Morrison is on the record as actively dissuading the strikers from pursuing their social activism,³⁸ but this did not sway their activism; rather, it may have potentially galvanised their commitment to the cause. Further, instead of just focusing on one political target – the seemingly pro-fossil fuel then PM – the protestors extended their critique to the federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley, the conservative National Party, and the Queensland Labor Party. Sussan Ley followed the party line on climate action, adopting a minimalist approach on carbon emission reductions and continuing to support fossil fuel extraction. The National Party’s policies on climate change have been at odds with the realities of the experiences of their supporter base: despite being a rural political party, where the effects of climate change are directly felt in terms of lived experiences with extreme weather events and challenging economic realities, the Nationals have pushed a conservative political agenda and, along with the Liberal Party, opted to take minimal action on climate change.³⁹

Effective environmental activism is a part of co-belonging for the SS4C and includes careful political interventions. For example, the SS4C’s targeting of the Queensland Labor Party was an attempt to leverage political power they do not directly have as children and young people. The Queensland Labor Party, while nominally a politically progressive party that is in power, has also been reticent to proactively halt logging or block the expansion of coal mining. For the SS4C to encompass multiple targets in this one multi-located event mirrors the depth of the campaign and the sophistication of their claims. Also, the integration and association of the SS4C with other protest movements is evident in their multiple points of intervention. It is also worth noting that the SS4C calls for a just transition for workers, disrupting the historical narrative of environment versus jobs and economy that politicians seem so fond of in Australia and other similar wealthy nations.

Place is important in grounding the SS4C around Australia, reflecting how social transgressions such as protests play out in a range of settings,⁴⁰ and that these specificities affect social movements. As we have shown in the digital data of the 15 October event, reporting on where the gatherings were situated played a part in building community and showing how co-belonging can be articulated in such a diverse nation, with numerous gatherings on different Countries. The digital affords the capacity to bring together diffuse events across large spaces and strengthen the social networks that enable the movement, capturing some of the particular qualities of places nationwide. Digital geographies of the movement are made clear in the reporting of place-based protests and descriptions that visually and textually record who engages, where they are situated, and why they are participating. On the role of place in SS4C, the strategy of locating the protest event in multiple sites across the continent at the same time, while invoking adult support across these different states and territories, may have put more pressure on politicians and political parties than if it was just one gathering, in one place. A distributed and digitally amplified protest movement produces a potentially more significant impact than a concentrated, singularly located event.

Centring Country in rethinking how and why humans and non-humans co-belong in the Anthropocene offers another way of approaching the digital. In the SS4C, Indigenous knowledges and protocols are central to the way the events are run, both in person and digitally. As Collin and Matthews describe, a Welcome to Country launched the 2019 large Sydney SS4C event, and climate justice concerns are central to the framing of the movement.⁴¹ The October 2021 event shared this focus with protest signs including calls for Indigenous justice in Perth, and the Brisbane/Meanjin event included a speech by a leader that began with a chant of ‘Always was/always will be/Aboriginal Land’. The Brisbane/Meanjin introductory speech connected this climate fight with the resistance led by First Nations people against settler colonialism since invasion. Multiple posters calling for climate justice and supporting First Nations’ people were carried by protestors.

Indigenous scholars have been questioning modernist notions of global environmental collapse for some time, drawing on Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies to counter universalist arguments. For instance, Indigenous science counters the ‘new’ assignation of living (and dying) in the Anthropocene with sound arguments about how colonial forces have produced environmental, social, and cultural crises for centuries. Kyle Whyte, a Potawatomi scholar-activist, argues that human-induced climate change is an extension and deepening of environmental crises imposed on Indigenous peoples around the world by colonial forces. Rather than accepting the science of environmental dilemmas on multiple fronts as agents producing the Anthropocene, Whyte argues that global environmental crises are another wave of extractive colonial practices.⁴² The problematic flattening of responsibility that accompanies Anthropocenic thinking – where all humans are defined as contributing to global environmental crises – deepens colonial thinking rather than overturns past injustices. Whyte suggests that Indigenous climate science is one way to remedy these universalist and marginalising tendencies and construct alternative futures. Another view is offered by Indigenous scholar Zoe Todd,⁴³ who argues for Indigenising the Anthropocene rather than allowing gentrification and white dominance of this intellectual idea that has captured scientific and social scientific imaginations.

With these critiques in mind, we can read how children and young people in Australia who participate in SS4C are aware of histories and presences of colonialism and the ongoing injustices that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experience on many fronts. The centring of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and issues in the running of SS4C events and the digital facilitation, recording, and reflections of those events all provide evidence of this knowledge. Further, the connections between SS4C and organisations such as Seed, Australia’s first Indigenous youth-led climate network, are also visible in participation at strike events. It is clear that climate justice arguments are core to the SS4C, including how Country must be recognised and that sovereignty of Australia is contested.

Digital worlds and future building within SS4C

The SS4C is an example of how children and young people are actively co-creating reparative digital worlds to confront and hopefully renegotiate Australian and global environmental crises. The digital content that facilitates, coordinates, records, and amplifies the in-person strikes and rallies is curated with a view to building solidarity and working towards justice. SS4C centres Indigenous knowledges and argues for climate justice in compelling ways that are building momentum, despite restrictive socio-political contexts and relatively limited opportunities to assert their political agency (in formal terms).

The multiple political strategies that undergird SS4C’s digital work shows how complex this movement is: rather than simply rehashing critiques and attacks on political leaders, different political targets appear in the materials circulating at the events and in the digital spaces associated with the strikes. As a case study of children and young people carving out space for their personal and collective goals, this SS4C event in late 2021 illustrates how striking digitally and in person can be a generative and hopeful act.

Future digital ecologies research could continue the emerging research on how children and young people are creating interventions in environmental governance. Digital ecologies scholarship might also centre conceptualisations of Country that facilitate involvement of, and respect for, Indigenous peoples and their knowledges. The agency of Country has been foregrounded in Indigenous scholarship of the digital, including within Carlson and Frazer’s book Indigenous Digital Life.⁴⁴ Activism and identity are important aspects of how and why Indigenous people use digital technologies,⁴⁵ and grounding both with connections to Country may provide avenues for digital ecologies approaches to continue doing decolonial work.

Digital ecologies as an approach can enable a focus on reparative relations, a repeated theme in this growing literature, and in depictions of creative (digital) social movements that are aiming to transform political, social, environmental, and economic relations. The relationship between the emergent literatures in digital ecologies and digital geographies will also provide productive conversations in these research areas.⁴⁶ Digital ecologies approaches that emphasise human and more-than-human relations might continue to provide productive linkages between digital geographic and media scholarship in future work.

In closing, one of the most remarkable qualities of SS4C is how it has managed to generate and express co-belonging, despite heavy critique from national political leaders and in the face of incredibly frustrating social, political, and environmental realities. The atmosphere at SS4C events, and in their associated digital worlds, is supportive, righteous, and joyous, even when climate change policy in Australia has been underwhelming, and despite incredibly high stakes, as reflected in the damaging realities of continuing to live with climate change.