Environmentalism and Its Representations in the Digital Age : A Content Analysis of @environmental_defense_fund, @get.waste.ed, and @zahranabiabani on Instagram

Sammanfattning: Research paper talks about environmentalism, and its representations in the digital age. The study is focused on Instagram and the sample of three selected profiles. The research is conducted through the scope of the Framing Theory, focusing on two specific theories, adapted as the main frames, them being a very recent framework, Climate Optimism, and Climate Doomism. The methodology used was content analysis, with implemented data sampling strategy, codebook development, and coding itself, which resulted in the results of the analysis. The overall aim of the master’s thesis is to investigate the framing and therefore representations of climate change, and therefore provide a better understanding of how climate change is framed within social media and what frameworks can be implemented to take action- either individual, or global. The results of the analysis confirmed that the occurrence of positive narratives around climate change narratives is more and more prominent, and it is argued, that the framework could be expanded to a much larger scale and an audience in future research.