Strategic Communication. How to Communicate Climate Emergency on Visual Social Media

This paper is part of a PhD research project that investigates the visual narratives adopted by climate justice movements in Italy. Specifically, the project inquiries strategies and organisation behind the communication challenges movements encounter. To this end, the analysis examines the visual production on Instagram through the accounts @xritalia, @fridaysforfutureitalia, and @ultima.generazione -national accounts of the corresponding movements- in the time frame between 2019 and 2023. Even though environmental theorists largely focused on textual analysis of media representations of environmental issues and the experience in the digital world, few addressed visual representations. The impact of movements on the issue of saliency and political personalisation in social movements remains to be fully understood. The multimethod approach allowed having an all-around view of the strategic communication adopted by climate movements in the Italian context; and address the polysemic nature of visual media. In addition to the longitudinal analysis, the multimodal analysis allowed the comparison of strategies between the movements’ strategies. Results show that although similar in goals and issues, movements' visual expression differ over time in communicating topics. In particular, the findings showed movements dissimilarly thematise claims and issues.