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Accepted Paper
Constructing Environmental Narratives in Digital Media: Internet Memes and Youth Digital Activism in Serbia
Ana Banić Grubišić
(University of Belgrade)
This paper explores how Serbian youth use internet memes to shape environmental narratives and activism. Through digital ethnography (2018 - present), it analyzes memes on hydropower and lithium protests, revealing critiques of extractive capitalism and visions of ecological justice.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how young people in Serbia use internet memes to construct environmental narratives and engage in digitally mediated activism. Internet memes, as a vernacular form of communication, enable youth to express opinions, frame debates, and participate in public discourse on ecological issues. A digital ethnography of social media content related to local ecological struggles has been conducted from 2018 to the present. Most of the collected internet memes refer to grassroots resistance to small hydropower projects and mass mobilisation against lithium extraction. Both struggles reveal contradictions between ecological protection and foreign-backed “greenwashed” investments. Within this corpus of internet memes, the paper identifies key narrative elements: characters (heroes and villains), settings, plots, and themes, which articulate dichotomies and negotiations between crisis and progress, and justice and corruption. Special attention is given to how memes encode critiques of extractive capitalism in the context of the European green transition while offering alternative imaginaries of nature and community in the local context. The paper emphasises the role of youth digital activism in broader struggles for ecological justice in Serbia.