Only the Young: The Rhetoric of Youth-Led Social Movements In the 21st Century

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine several examples of contemporary youth-led protest in conjunction with some of the specific challenges of organizing in the present day. In each chapter, I pair one circumstance that makes organizing more difficult (e.g. neoliberal corporate power and the attention economy) with a particular youth-led social movement that has taken steps to overcome it. Chapter one studies the survivors of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as they used social and mass media to organize a massive march and bus tour in the months following the shooting. Chapter two focuses on the successful effort to unionize Amazon warehouse JFK8 in 2021, while chapter three looks at varying approaches within the climate movement including Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future organization, disruptors like Just Stop Oil and Climate Defiance, and the plaintiffs in the Held v. Montana court case that took place in summer 2023. By analyzing the tactics that each of these movements use to overcome the challenges facing them, I am able to identify a consistent set of features of youth social movements that young organizers and activists employ across movements. Some of these features are making claims toward the future, mass self-communication, mutualistic outreach, and a focus on issues over institutions. The project ends with a brief examination of Black Lives Matter as a touchstone for seeing all of these features in action and looking forward to future possibilities for further study.