Power relationships in greta thunberg's speech about world climate change
International Journal of Development Research
Power relationships in greta thunberg's speech about world climate change
Received 11th October, 2020; Received in revised form 16th November, 2020; Accepted 13th December, 2020; Published online 30th January, 2021
Copyright © 2021, Priscilla Chantal Duarte Silva, Palloma da Costa e Silva and Ricardo Luiz Perez Teixeira. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
A Climate change is a global environmental threat. The economic, social and environmental consequences have been discussed by climate organizations and activists. The emergence of political changes linked to environmental issues has fueled protests around the world because there are many discussions and few concrete results. The aim of this study is to analyze linguistically-discursively the power relations in the speech of environmental activist Greta Thunberg and what Sociology of the Environment has discussed regarding the participation of society in environmental protection policies. The climate change activist's speeches are selected from the internet. Discourse analysis is used under the theory of Perelman (2005) considering argumentation as a form of persuasion and Foucault (1999) about discourse and power. The analysis by Dunlap (2015) and Okereke (2018) follows, following the stream of Chateauraunaud's pragmatic sociology (2005). The results show that there is a prevalence of a persuasive discourse aimed at the climate crisis, in an attempt to highlight the emergencies and the strength of the new generation for political movements. It is concluded that public policies are guided by concrete actions based on social movements, not only in terms of social movements based on environmental awareness, but also on the demands of the next generation and forms of power through discourse.