Children’s activities and education increasingly take place online, to the point that distinguishing between the online and offline worlds of children is increasingly challenging. While it is not uncommon for attitudes towards children’s online lives to convey representations of internet technology as an external of objective force in children’s lives, these representations focus narrowly on one particular dimension of children’s lives and neglect the wider contexts that shape children’s online presence, including the meanings that children associate with digital technologies (Mansell, 2011; Manyozo, 2011). Stoilova et al (2016) argue for the need to analyse the role of digital technology as emergent from the society in which it exerts influence (Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2009; Mansell, 2012), particularly in the lives and experiences of children, and how they participate in online spaces.

The concept of participation has been used extensively in a wide range of meanings across various fields, but questions arise about what ‘political participation’ means in respect of social media (Sairambay, 2020). The arrival of digital media has added non-political methods of engaging in political life that often appear to form the basis of political participation, but are also embedded in into everyday contexts that evolve to become politically meaningful acts (Theocharis, 2015). Zuckerman (2014) goes as far as to suggest that social media can reinvent ‘participation’ itself. The internet has had an enormous impact on how individuals connect with one another, and how they gather and share information (Dalton, 2009). The rapid growth of social media now enables the construction of personal and group identities that are key antecedents of protest behaviour (Dalton et al, 2009). Where social movements in the 1960s centred on group identity (such as women, indigenous peoples, minorities), cause issues (such as nuclear energy or environmental conservation), these identity politics have evolved into more heterogenous forms and consequently comprise more personalised expressions in activating individual social networks. Bennett (2012) suggests that this more personal politics has become a notable trend in social movements where participation is channelled through social networks in which people can share stories and experiences; social media enables people to activate their own social networks to drive collective action processes.

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the online world became even more pertinent in children’s (and everybody’s) lives. Online spaces became everyday, real life spaces for what may be a vast majority of children in the northern hemisphere, and with this rapid transition, in the context of the global health emergency, existing political participation led by children had to move online also. One prominent example of this is the School Strike for Climate led by Greta Thunberg. This social movement had reached fever pitch before the pandemic, with a number of high profile rallies planned: one in Bristol, and one in Brussels. The sudden lockdown of society, however, meant that in order to maintain momentum, the School Strike for Climate became Climate Strike Online, using the hashtags #FridaysForFuture and #climatestrikeonline for visibility.

Here at the VARiE Research Group, one of our research projects examines what this transition to online striking means for children’s participation in the context of children’s lives during Covid-19. This requires a novel methodology that is appropriate to the online nature of children and young people’s participation in the Covid era. Our digital ethnographic project collects data from social media under hashtags #FridaysForFuture and #ClimateStrikeOnline on three separate dates:

• 28^th February 2020 – the Bristol Climate Strike before COP25
• 6^th March 2020 – the Brussels Climate Strike
• 13^th March 2020 – the first climate strike online

Numbering upwards of 9,300 tweets were collected using MAXQDA, in addition interviews and focus groups with climate strike activists will be conducted to explore the opportunities and challenges the digital environment poses to children’s rights to assembly and peaceful protest. The social media data and the lived-experiences of the climate activists participating in the online strikes during will help us to better understand how children exercise their right to peaceful assembly in the digital era.