Icons matter
Greta Thunberg’s role in inspiring mass school walkouts worldwide has made her an international icon.
While Greta Thunberg is far from being alone as a leading figure in this movement, her iconic power has been important in launching and building the movement and also in shifting climate politics.
The #schoolstrike4climate movement is a good example of how ‘people power‘ and the power of stories and images work in combination.
What makes Greta Thunberg and the #schoolstrike movement iconic?
What makes images iconic? Sometimes, social movements use images mainly as illustrations – e.g. for advertising a campaign or event. Icons play a different, more fundamental role.
The table that follows below outlines some of the factors and how they feature in the example of Greta Thunberg.
Images of Greta Thunberg and the #schoolstrike movement
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Iconic images from other movements
Greta Thunberg, #schoolstrike4climate and some of the ‘ingredients’ of iconic power
So many of the images that become iconic feature some or all of the features listed below.
The table points to some of the factors that can help explain why Greta Thunberg and the #schoolstrike movement have an iconic impact.
‘Ingredients’ of iconic images | Greta Thunberg & #schoolstrike4climate |
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Narration and dramatisation | ||
| Visible political theatre | ||
| Icons often portray the dramatic actions of an energised group laying down a symbolic challenge to its opponents: examples include the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, black students sitting at ‘whites only’ lunch counters in the US in the 1960s, the ‘tank man’ in Tiananmen Square, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, and Gandhi illegally picking up salt by the sea during the ‘Salt March’. | The ‘theatre’ of the schoolstrike4climate has included: • The dramatic tension of young people calling adult political leaders to account and going out on strike to make their point: the drama has pitted Greta Thunberg and thousands like her against the fossil fuel industry and its supporters • the controversy of climate strikers disregarding the opposition of politicians and defiantly turning out on the streets • Greta Thunberg appearing outside the Swedish parliament with her “Skolstrejk för klimatet” sign and sailing back and forth across the Atlantic • the drama of this movement snowballing around the world and inspiring millions of supporters |
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| Narrative strength | ||
| ‘Only that which narrates can make us understand’ writes Susan Sontag in ’On Photography’. The power of an icon can depend on the characters involved, the plot, the sense of something important at stake, and the level of suspense about an outcome that is uncertain. | See the narrative power of #schoolstrike4climate | |
Processes which enable icons to be established in the public mind | ||
| Ongoing re-creation of the icon: building an ongoing place in public awareness through commemoration, replication of images, public art… | ||
| For example, in South Africa,the photograph of Hector Pieterson was “endlessly reproduced onto T- shirts, on posters and front pages of newspapers”, becoming a ‘visual synonym’ of the Soweto uprising – Patricia Gassner | • young people carrying ‘school strike for climate’-style signs • the expansion of Fridays for a Future actions • murals of Greta Thunberg (e.g. in Bristol, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Melbourne – and another in Melbourne • school Strike for Climate on social media • ‘I’m with Greta Thunberg’ Facebook group |
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| Wide circulation of imagery in the media | ||
| Patricia Leavy writes, ‘the mass media are central to the construction of… iconic events, which once legendary [in the culture] can then be used to further political and/ or corporate agendas’. While the mainstream media are important, social movements can also create and manage their own media. | Extensive coverage of the school strike movement in mainstream and social media |
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Content | ||
| Cultural depth: mythic themes, and cultural resonance | ||
| Icons frequently ‘strike a chord’ with deep cultural and historical themes. They often feature ‘mythic’ themes that powerfully shape politics, and personal and societal experience. | Greta Thunberg and the school strike movement ‘strike a chord’ in a number of ways: • a relatively ‘powerless’ young person calls out powerful politicians and industry, speaking truth to power The story, like so many books and films, features intergenerational conflict between a young hero and an older opponent. This is the pattern in the story of David and Goliath, where David is a young shepherd. • Greta Thunberg’s story also echoes a long history of youth-led protest, from the Soweto uprisings in South Africa and the early work of the Youth League of the African National Congress in that country to the work of the US Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to anti-Vietnam war protest to the role of young people in Black Lives Matter |
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| Humanly poignant | ||
| • young people pitted against the power of governments and the fossil fuel industry • Greta Thunberg is attacked by opponents like Andrew Bolt, a high-profile News Corporation media figure who describes her as “disturbed” and “strange”- in an article that the Australian Press Council found breached journalistic standards |
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| Hidden social forces become visible | ||
| • The climate debate shifts from technical policy issues to being about the future of young people who face the prospect of inheriting the consequences of decisions made by older people now • the values of those who mock or oppose the school strike movement are put on display • the failure of existing government processes at national and international level are brought into focus |
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| Moral power | ||
| Commenting on the US civil rights movement, sociologist Jeffrey Alexander writes about how ‘riveting moral demands’ changed politics as usual, and how conflicts which could be seen as based on distribution of resources and structural position in society were translated into a moral confrontation. He discusses the ‘emotional and moral commitments that compelled [people] to get involved’, how social change is propelled through triggering a sense that moral standards have been violated, and ‘the moral force of civil opinion’. James Jasper offers the concept of ‘moral batteries’: ‘the combination of positive and negative emotions that, through their contrast, help energize action’ through highlighting the ‘contrast between the way things are now and the way things might be’ . Mervyn Horgan writes that ‘arguments must become moral if they are to succeed’. | In ‘Children’s Moral Power Can Challenge Corporate Power on Climate Crisis’, veteran activist Ralph Nader notes the moral authority that children have to challenge their parents’ habits or opinions Climate scientist Will Steffen states, “These students… have so much moral authority because it’s their future that we’re destroying by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.” |
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| An individual focuses public attention: the story features ‘characters’ who audiences identify with | ||
| This is the case with the stories of Nelson Mandela, the ‘tank man’ in Tiananmen square, Rigoberta Menchu or Malala Yousafzai. Philip Smith and Nicolas Howe note how people can identify with Anne Frank, while ‘the six million deaths of the Holocaust are barely comprehensible’. | • Greta Thunberg both launches the movement and is its public face (though as articles in Vox, Earthday and Global Citizen note, she is far from being alone as a leader). • the strength of identification with Greta Thunberg is reflected by the prominence of images of her at school strike events (and initiatives such as the ‘I’m with Greta Thunberg’ Facebook group). |
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| The imagery is generated and maintained by an inspired and organised group | ||
| – clearly the case with the school strike movement | ||
| Visual power | ||
| The school strike movement creates dramatic and imaginative images. | ||
| Simplicity | ||
| Philip Smith observes how the Woodstock festival ‘condensed a particular set of representations,… drawing [them] into a coherent pattern. Then it exploded them outwards. Simplification, condensation, expansion: these are the hallmarks of iconic process’. David Perlmutter discusses the image of the tank man in Tiananmen Square, observing that icons tend to have ‘very few distinct visual elements’ | A child holding a sign demanding a safe future… Rather than complex messages which ’lecture’ an audience, images of students going on strike for a safe future have ‘reached’ audiences. |
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‘The power of single images’
In a 2012 dialogue about climate change communication, documentary filmmaker Jon Else argued that the climate debate has lacked the powerful images that have played a defining role in earlier movements. Recalling the imagery generated by the US Civil Rights movement, he observes,
I think one of the problems with climate change—no-one ever succeeded in tying that to a dog going after a demonstrator and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama… If we’re talking about big movements like the environmental movement, like the Civil Rights Movement… I mean you could, in a way, say that the facts about slavery were known for a long time. And it took things like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”… it took the slow building of a movement around narratives and around images… The power of single images [is] underestimated.
He was speaking before the #schoolstrike movement appeared on the scene and, arguably, the image of Greta Thunberg goes at least some of the way towards making the kind of difference that he is talking about.
Greta Thunberg’s story
In the following interviews on Democracy Now, Greta Thunberg describes her life and how she became an activist:
See also
- her mother describes the first school strike, as well as challenges she faced early in her life.
- her story is told by journalists India Bourke and Suyin Haynes.
‘Greta Thunberg is the icon the planet desperately needs’
‘Greta Thunberg is the icon the planet desperately needs‘, writes U.S. filmmaker and screenwriter Darren Aronofsky in the New York Times.
He describes his reaction when he first saw an image of Greta Thunberg:
a 15-year-old girl, sitting outside the Swedish Parliament, on strike from school to bring attention to climate change. Here was the image — one of hope, commitment and action — I needed to see. An image that could spark a movement’.
Darren Aronofsky discusses why images count in climate politics:
It is through imagery that we tell stories about who we are or want to be. Some images do more than just represent an idea; they deepen, illuminate, connect. They can make us pause or change our minds… powerful images tend to show us what we’ve tried to ignore. Their rawness slices through the haze… visual language is the ultimate tool of communication and connection… Ms. Thunberg… has made it human, tangible and urgent.
New Statesman’s India Bourke writes:
Thunberg’s name is now synonymous with the mass school walkouts spreading across the world…
She explained how she formed the idea of a strike after winning an environmental writing competition and connecting with the Fossil Free Dalsland movement in Sweden. Inspired by pupils in Parkland, Florida, who commemorated a mass shooting with a walkout, she maintained her plan even as other campaigners backed a protest march instead…
she convinced her parents to stop flying, become vegan, install solar batteries, grow their own vegetables and only use their electric car when necessary – a series of steps that culminated, in the summer of 2018, with her decision to skip school…
By invoking the moral power of the intergenerational contract – the vow of present generations to conserve the Earth for future ones – the strikes have resonated across borders.
Time magazine named Greta Thunberg Person of the Year for 2019. Summing up her influence, and the influence of the movement she sparked, it states:
she has succeeded in creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change.
She has offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled shame on those who are not. She has persuaded leaders, from mayors to Presidents, to make commitments where they had previously fumbled: after she spoke to Parliament and demonstrated with the British environmental group Extinction Rebellion, the U.K. passed a law requiring that the country eliminate its carbon footprint. She has focused the world’s attention on environmental injustices that young indigenous activists have been protesting for years. Because of her, hundreds of thousands of teenage “Gretas,” from Lebanon to Liberia, have skipped school to lead their peers in climate strikes around the world.