Speaker
Description
Social media have become key spaces where younger generations learn to feel, interpret and act on the environmental crisis (Bowman et al., 2021). Among these, TikTok, a platform dominated by Gen Z users (Cervi, 2021), offers a unique lens through which to study how environmental discourses are produced and circulated among and by young people.
While prior studies on climate change related content on this platform often focus on hashtags (e.g., Hautea et al., 2021), TikTok’s key affordance that allows users to reuse and reinterpret audio (Jones, 2023: 25) remains underexplored. The audiomeme, defined as a unit of audio in which “users reinterpret the lyrics, meanings, or emotions of songs and sound clips” (Kaye & Abdin, 2021: 62) emerges as a particularly rich form within the platform’s logic (Ibid.) and therefore warrants further investigation.
Aiming to expand the study of climate change discourse within the context of audiomemes, this study analyses remixes of a soundtrack based on the song Rolling in the Deep by Adele, produced by an eco-sustainability account (www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-7129008762307873578). Using the Social Media–Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) overarching framework (KhosraviNik, 2017), it explores how the various audiomemes derived from this soundtrack construct narratives of the climate crisis within TikTok’s logic.
Combining a linguistic analysis of the lyrics with a multimodal approach tailored to TikTok (Grzenkowicz & Wildfeuer, 2025) of the audiomemes, the study investigates how remixing practices shape emotional engagement and activism, revealing how Gen Z negotiates climate discourse through TikTok’s participatory vernacular.
| Keywords | social media critical discourse studies, TikTok audiomeme, climate crisis |
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| s.causa@unior.it |