In 2019 the climate movement experienced an unprecedented growth in its mobilization capacity and its political and media impact. The success of the movement is closely linked to the figure of Greta Thunberg and the global impact of her discourse and the “Fridays for Future” movement in hundreds of cities around the world.

A study by Silvia Díaz-Pérez, Roger Soler-i-Martí and Mariona Ferrer-Fons, members of the UPF JOVIS research group of the Department of Communication, analyses the activist’s speeches and messages on social networks and their legitimization through her personal story, and it also looks into the “Fridays for Future” movement in Barcelona, based on Twitter and Instagram posts. The research was based on a project that has received funding from UPF’s Planetary Wellbeing call.

Greta Thunberg creates a framework for collective action that is present in her speeches and posts on social networks and has great strength and a great impact

“What it analyses, therefore the article is how Greta Thunberg creates a framework for collective action that is present in her speeches and posts on social networks and has great strength and a great impact because it is accompanied by a personal story that follows the monomyth structure”, Roger Soler-Martí explains. In mythology and art, the monomyth takes the shape of the archetypal journey of the hero who achieves such status by overcoming dangers and adventures after a calling or suffering an event that takes him from an ordinary world to a mythical world.

“Fridays for Future”, an international, principally student movement that protests to demand action against global warming and climate change, gained momentum when the activist Greta Thunberg began to demonstrate in front of Swedish Parliament, in August 2018. The “Fridays for Future” movement, despite its diversity, serves Greta Thunberg as an agent of mobilization and resonance.

The “Fridays for Future” movement, despite its diversity, serves as an agent of mobilization and resonance in the activist’s frame

The authors studied how Thunberg’s global frame is incorporated locally, for which they focused on the case of “Fridays for Future” in Barcelona via Twitter and Instagram content from its creation (February 2019) until the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic.

The results show a clear influence of the activist in the discourse of local movements and among their followers. As Soler-i-Martí, co-author of the work  explains, “despite the rejection of personalist leaderships and despite the particular characteristics of the local group, the activist’s global framework is very present in the discourse broadcast on “Fridays for Future” Barcelona social networks”.

The construction of the frames in social movements arise from two-way dialogue between the global and the local dimensions

And Soler-i-Martí adds, “In addition, the study reveals how the experience of local groups of the movement also influenced the evolution of Thunberg’s discourse, which has changed over time, incorporating new actors and strategies. This element highlights how the construction of the frames in social movements arise from two-way dialogue between the global and the local dimensions”.

The analysis provides empirical evidence of the importance of global and local dynamics in social movements on the Internet and highlights that the use of the basic elements of Thunberg’s frame lead messages from the local “Fridays for Future”  Barcelona movement to have a greater impact on social networks among its followers.

The article is relevant because it shows the glocal (global-local) dynamics in the creation and resonance of the discourse and messages of a global social movement, as well as the central role of social networks in this process. The study ends by showing how the pandemic has altered this framework of collective action that requires adapting to the new circumstances.

Related work:

Silvia Díaz-Pérez, Roger Soler-i-Martí, Mariona Ferrer-Fons (2021), "From the global myth to local mobilization: Creation and resonance of Greta Thunberg’s frame", Comunicar, 68, https://doi.org/10.3916/C68-2021-03

A line of research being pursued by Narcís Parés, head of the Full-Body Interaction Lab at the UPF Cognitive Media Technologies Group at the DTIC, seeks to demonstrate the potential of a mixed reality system to promote social initiation behaviours in children with autism spectrum disorder. The latest results of this research have just been presented at the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction along with Batuhan Sayis, a doctoral student at the DTIC-UPF, and Hatice Gunes, head of the Affective Intelligence & Robotics Lab at the University of Cambridge (UK).

“Our main aim in this study was to demonstrate that a mixed reality platform can be used to alter non-verbal body behaviour during social interaction between children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as well as in a traditional therapy setting using LEGO building tools”, Parés explains.  And he adds: “a second goal was to show how these body cues differ between ASD and non-ASD children during social initiation using these two platforms. 

They present the first analysis of the body cues generated under two conditions in a repeated-measures design

“We used machine learning techniques to analyse the visual data of eighteen trials of ASC and non-ASC dyads”, Parés points out. In their work, the authors present the first analysis of the body cues generated under two conditions in a repeated-measures design. The authors compared a mixed reality system with a typical social intervention strategy based on LEGO building tools, where both mediated a face-to-face dyadic play session between an ASC child and a non-ASC child. During the children’s interaction, the researchers obtained body cue indicators generated in both conditions (mixed reality and construction games) of both subjects individually (e.g., distances between joints and their movements) and interpersonally (e.g., proximity and visual focus of attention). 

The results of the study revealed that during social interaction there were differences between the body expressions of ASC and non-ASC children, both at individual and interpersonal level, for LEGO and for the MR system. They also showed that the characteristics that indicate differences between ASD and non-ASD in terms of non-verbal behaviour during initiation were higher for the mixed reality system compared to traditional therapy using LEGO.

Finally, the computational models evaluated by combining these characteristics that are indicative of differences between children with and without ASD allowed the researchers to recognize the kinds of social initiation (ASD or non-ASD) on the basis of bodily attitudes in LEGO and in mixed reality settings. These results demonstrate the potential benefits of full body interaction and MR settings for children with ASD. 

Related work:

Batuhan Sayis , Narcís Parés, Hatice Gunes (2020), "Bodily Expression of Social Initiation Behaviors in ASC and non-ASC children: Mixed Reality vs. LEGO Game Play". Companion Publication of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.58023.