New Article by Dr Viktoria Spaiser, Dr Nicole Nisbett and Dr Cristina G. Stefan published in PLOS Climate

Dr Viktoria Spaiser, Dr Nicole Nisbett and Dr Cristina G. Stefan from POLIS have had their article - "“How dare you?”—The normative challenge posed by Fridays for Future" - published in the PLOS Climate journal on 3rd October 2022.

Spaiser, Nisbett and Stefan argue that meeting the Paris Agreement will require unprecedented social change that goes hand in hand with technological and economic innovations. Research suggests that normative change, the change in what is perceived as normal or morally acceptable, can drive wider large-scale social change, i.e., change in legislation, policy, and behaviour.
Their article explores the normative challenge posed by Fridays for Future, analysing computationally a large data set of tweets in the context of this protest movement to understand the normative framework that challenges business as usual. It shows that Friday for Future’s normative framework makes the shared, unjust casualty experience of young people because of the unmitigated climate crisis accessible to the public. The victims are now in spatial, temporal, and social proximity, they are our children and grandchildren, and this makes the normative challenge of the status quo (continuation of fossil-fuel based economy) so potent. The normative framework references human rights and duty of care when establishing an anti-fossil-fuel norm and prescribes solidarity with climate victims in the Global South, activism and seeking solutions that are based in science.

The paper is open access and available to read here.