1 00:00:00,065 --> 00:00:04,500 Generation Z is a generation 2 00:00:04,660 --> 00:00:08,580 that has been born and has developed 3 00:00:09,820 --> 00:00:14,340 in moments of crisis that have been extremely intense 4 00:00:14,740 --> 00:00:19,940 and have, say, interacted with each other. 5 00:00:24,060 --> 00:00:25,947 Donatella Della Porta is a professor of political science 6 00:00:25,972 --> 00:00:27,852 and dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences 7 00:00:27,877 --> 00:00:29,248 at the Scuola Normale Superiore. 8 00:00:29,273 --> 00:00:32,920 Her work is a world reference in the field of social movement studies. 9 00:00:33,093 --> 00:00:35,564 What are the main findings of the research 10 00:00:35,589 --> 00:00:37,928 you have conducted on the Millennials’ protests? 11 00:00:38,600 --> 00:00:41,599 I think that the concept of generation is, in general, very important 12 00:00:41,600 --> 00:00:50,780 in the development of a critical view on injustice of different types, 13 00:00:51,020 --> 00:00:57,180 intersectionally addressing the issues of injustice 14 00:00:57,380 --> 00:01:01,740 in social terms, in gender terms, in racial terms and so on. 15 00:01:02,060 --> 00:01:08,900 And it has done so also starting from an acknowledgement 16 00:01:09,020 --> 00:01:14,340 of some specific characteristics of Millennials’ own experiences. 17 00:01:14,500 --> 00:01:21,900 So, what we have studied is especially the mobilised part of this generation. 18 00:01:22,020 --> 00:01:24,940 Τhose who were politically active. 19 00:01:25,460 --> 00:01:33,580 What we saw is that it is a generation that defines itself as precarious 20 00:01:33,740 --> 00:01:38,020 not only in terms of the work conditions 21 00:01:38,140 --> 00:01:42,940 but also, more generally, in terms of their life experience. 22 00:01:43,460 --> 00:01:46,620 And it is so because there is at the same time 23 00:01:46,740 --> 00:01:52,180 a reduction of the type of protections on the labour market, 24 00:01:52,460 --> 00:01:56,620 but also a decline in general of social rights 25 00:01:56,740 --> 00:02:02,100 that affects this generation in a very deep way, 26 00:02:02,260 --> 00:02:08,540 changing the perceptions of what their life is going to be, 27 00:02:08,740 --> 00:02:15,020 procrastinating the achievement of some of the main steps 28 00:02:15,260 --> 00:02:21,060 in the process of entering societies. 29 00:02:22,460 --> 00:02:26,980 It is also a generation that has a strong sense of betrayal, 30 00:02:27,180 --> 00:02:32,420 of being betrayed not only from the previous generations 31 00:02:32,540 --> 00:02:36,380 but mostly from the political and social system 32 00:02:36,540 --> 00:02:42,500 that does not include the Millennial generation 33 00:02:42,660 --> 00:02:47,060 in the political and social process. 34 00:02:47,540 --> 00:02:53,340 And it feels betrayed not only from the government but also, often, 35 00:02:53,620 --> 00:02:58,180 from those parties that are supposed to care about social injustice. 36 00:02:58,740 --> 00:03:05,060 Nevertheless, it is a generation that doesn't despair 37 00:03:05,700 --> 00:03:13,020 because it is very committed to transformation. 38 00:03:14,020 --> 00:03:17,380 We know this because besides the research that we have done 39 00:03:17,540 --> 00:03:21,140 on the most mobilised side of this generation, 40 00:03:21,260 --> 00:03:23,740 what we learn looking at opinion polls 41 00:03:23,860 --> 00:03:30,420 is that against the expectations of depoliticization, 42 00:03:31,180 --> 00:03:35,340 in reality in many countries this generation 43 00:03:35,500 --> 00:03:40,780 has been characterised by high sense of commitment, 44 00:03:40,940 --> 00:03:46,500 high tolerance and sensibilities to issues of rights in general. 45 00:03:47,373 --> 00:03:49,115 What are the differences 46 00:03:49,140 --> 00:03:52,728 between the politicisation of Gen Zers and that of the Millennials? 47 00:03:53,280 --> 00:03:58,380 What we pointed out in our research is that also for activists, 48 00:03:58,660 --> 00:04:05,460 generations are short cohorts, smaller groups, 49 00:04:05,740 --> 00:04:09,820 because their understanding of generations 50 00:04:09,940 --> 00:04:13,580 is very much related to specific experiences 51 00:04:13,660 --> 00:04:18,460 that have been living through adolescent life 52 00:04:18,620 --> 00:04:25,300 and it is also very much affected by the specific characteristics 53 00:04:25,940 --> 00:04:28,580 of social movements in that period. 54 00:04:28,660 --> 00:04:34,340 For instance, what I mean is that the protests against austerity 55 00:04:34,780 --> 00:04:41,140 had different types of effects for the Millennial generation 56 00:04:41,340 --> 00:04:43,540 in Greece or in Germany 57 00:04:43,660 --> 00:04:46,700 because they had different degrees of intensity, 58 00:04:46,940 --> 00:04:53,260 and so also different capacity to involve the young generation. 59 00:04:53,420 --> 00:04:57,060 Considering these differences 60 00:04:57,380 --> 00:05:02,980 and the differences in the definition of generations itself, 61 00:05:03,980 --> 00:05:06,460 I think that what we can say 62 00:05:06,580 --> 00:05:12,620 is that the Millennial generation has been characterised by experiences 63 00:05:12,780 --> 00:05:15,020 of very broad movements, 64 00:05:15,740 --> 00:05:20,700 that have been able to have an impact 65 00:05:20,860 --> 00:05:23,820 also on the political and social level, 66 00:05:23,940 --> 00:05:28,580 but especially at the cultural level in several European countries. 67 00:05:28,820 --> 00:05:36,980 Generation Z is a generation that has been born and has developed 68 00:05:38,860 --> 00:05:43,860 in moments of crisis that have been extremely intense 69 00:05:44,020 --> 00:05:49,100 and have interacted with each other. 70 00:05:49,540 --> 00:05:54,420 So, the financial crisis was not yet over in several countries, 71 00:05:54,580 --> 00:05:59,460 in particular in European peripheries like Southern Europe, 72 00:05:59,940 --> 00:06:03,700 and the pandemic crisis arrived, 73 00:06:03,900 --> 00:06:08,180 and the climate crisis became more and more visible 74 00:06:08,340 --> 00:06:11,780 and now there is a military crisis. 75 00:06:11,860 --> 00:06:17,140 So, it is a generation that has been embedded in a situation 76 00:06:17,300 --> 00:06:21,260 not only of crisis but also of multiple crises. 77 00:06:22,580 --> 00:06:26,740 In different countries it's this generation 78 00:06:26,900 --> 00:06:32,180 that undergoes different types of experiences. 79 00:06:32,740 --> 00:06:35,020 So the pandemic times 80 00:06:35,220 --> 00:06:42,220 had a particularly high impact on this generation. 81 00:06:42,380 --> 00:06:50,060 But also, in some countries the political experience of participation 82 00:06:50,220 --> 00:06:53,980 has been quite important, think about Chile for instance, 83 00:06:54,100 --> 00:06:59,700 that during the pandemic was able as a country 84 00:06:59,900 --> 00:07:04,940 to put forward and develop the seeds of a change 85 00:07:05,100 --> 00:07:11,060 that has been already developed in 2019 in pre-pandemic time. 86 00:07:11,220 --> 00:07:16,500 Young Generation Z has been very much involved in Lebanon 87 00:07:17,220 --> 00:07:22,660 in the protest for democracy, in Catalunya, in several countries, 88 00:07:22,860 --> 00:07:26,260 so it has been also a mobilised generation. 89 00:07:26,460 --> 00:07:33,220 But we still have to see which type of opportunities were created. 90 00:07:33,420 --> 00:07:36,492 What psychological impact have the past decade’s crises, 91 00:07:36,517 --> 00:07:40,748 such as the economic recession and the pandemic, had on the Millennials? 92 00:07:41,480 --> 00:07:44,940 I am not a psychologist but what we see 93 00:07:45,140 --> 00:07:52,180 in studying the mobilised part of this generation 94 00:07:52,380 --> 00:08:00,740 is that the personal life conditions are very relevant for the mobilisations. 95 00:08:02,060 --> 00:08:06,380 So, we have seen that many of the protests, 96 00:08:06,500 --> 00:08:09,500 like the Fridays for Future and the Black Lives Matter 97 00:08:09,700 --> 00:08:16,260 that we mentioned before, have been characterised 98 00:08:16,420 --> 00:08:20,380 by a strong degree of reflections, 99 00:08:20,620 --> 00:08:26,100 self-reflexivity on their own conditions of life. 100 00:08:26,260 --> 00:08:32,020 While in the past, progressive movements and movement activists 101 00:08:32,180 --> 00:08:35,900 tended to focus on the collective experiences, 102 00:08:36,060 --> 00:08:40,700 these movements also put a lot of attention 103 00:08:40,820 --> 00:08:45,940 on the ways in which people individually live through these experiences. 104 00:08:46,580 --> 00:08:56,100 And the sufferance related to the multiple types of exclusions and insecurity 105 00:08:56,300 --> 00:09:02,300 related also with all these crises has been part and parcels 106 00:09:02,580 --> 00:09:07,020 also of the discourse of the Fridays for Future 107 00:09:07,220 --> 00:09:14,660 that stress their own conditions as a generation that is denied a future, 108 00:09:15,300 --> 00:09:21,300 the possibility to decide on a future life and so on. 109 00:09:22,940 --> 00:09:26,420 Of course, at the individual level, then, 110 00:09:26,580 --> 00:09:34,660 the way of reacting to these feelings of insecurity could be very different. 111 00:09:34,940 --> 00:09:38,900 What we saw in the protests that I mentioned 112 00:09:39,060 --> 00:09:42,880 is that this generation is not totally resourceless 113 00:09:43,280 --> 00:09:48,140 because they have also been very much able 114 00:09:48,380 --> 00:09:53,580 to use their skills in technological issues, 115 00:09:53,900 --> 00:10:02,340 to trigger responses to these conditions, 116 00:10:02,620 --> 00:10:08,296 also in quite inventive ways and effective ways. 117 00:10:08,867 --> 00:10:11,212 What is the correlation 118 00:10:11,668 --> 00:10:15,498 between the use of social media and youth movements? 119 00:10:16,241 --> 00:10:20,020 The activists we interviewed were very explicit 120 00:10:20,180 --> 00:10:25,860 in connecting their own general experience of social interactions 121 00:10:26,060 --> 00:10:28,780 with their online experience. 122 00:10:28,940 --> 00:10:33,020 And they did so also in criticising 123 00:10:33,260 --> 00:10:39,300 the ways in which social movement organisations are often organised. 124 00:10:40,140 --> 00:10:43,420 So, I remember one of the interviewees saying: 125 00:10:43,620 --> 00:10:47,620 “Yes, we are the generation that is always texting 126 00:10:47,740 --> 00:10:52,980 and is accustomed to very fast connections. 127 00:10:53,300 --> 00:10:58,060 We are not a generation that can sit two hours in a room 128 00:10:58,260 --> 00:11:05,400 to talk about let's say generic issues.” 129 00:11:06,620 --> 00:11:14,460 And the experience with technologies pushes towards often the search 130 00:11:14,580 --> 00:11:22,820 for very rapid responses but also on the positive sense of creativity. 131 00:11:24,500 --> 00:11:27,180 And this is something that we have seen 132 00:11:27,380 --> 00:11:31,020 in the Black Lives Matter protest for instance. 133 00:11:32,300 --> 00:11:40,020 Pragmatic use of very different forms of communications 134 00:11:41,300 --> 00:11:44,740 elaborated by young people. 135 00:11:45,420 --> 00:11:48,740 From what we saw in our research, 136 00:11:48,900 --> 00:11:56,300 there is much more attention also to politicise the private sphere of life. 137 00:11:57,780 --> 00:12:02,700 Μany of the groups we studied made by young activists 138 00:12:03,540 --> 00:12:10,780 were focusing their activities also on issues of sports and Art 139 00:12:11,380 --> 00:12:16,420 and they said “we need to do this because this is a precarious generation, 140 00:12:16,580 --> 00:12:19,660 is often a generation that doesn't have time, 141 00:12:20,060 --> 00:12:26,020 that needs to have three jobs to attend universities 142 00:12:26,260 --> 00:12:32,780 that are more and more requiring fast commitment in learning and so on. 143 00:12:33,060 --> 00:12:37,540 So, we cannot ask people to sacrifice 144 00:12:37,820 --> 00:12:43,780 the small amount of free time they have, we have to politicise it.” 145 00:12:44,660 --> 00:12:47,260 I think this is important 146 00:12:47,540 --> 00:12:52,260 and another general observation on communications 147 00:12:52,420 --> 00:12:57,060 is the fact that the young activists are online doesn't mean 148 00:12:57,180 --> 00:12:59,620 that they are not offline. 149 00:12:59,820 --> 00:13:07,260 The communicational skills are influenced by the experiences online 150 00:13:07,540 --> 00:13:14,540 but are also made by different forms of interactions offline. 151 00:13:15,420 --> 00:13:21,380 And this is already a lesson from the 2011 protest 152 00:13:21,500 --> 00:13:25,300 that the activists had already learned before. 153 00:13:25,540 --> 00:13:30,300 So, the movements of the squares were such because the activists 154 00:13:30,700 --> 00:13:35,420 had realised that they cannot mobilise only on facebook, 155 00:13:35,700 --> 00:13:40,220 or only on twitter by tweeting, 156 00:13:40,420 --> 00:13:43,980 that you have to use these instruments, 157 00:13:44,260 --> 00:13:48,100 but you also have to meet other people. 158 00:13:48,260 --> 00:13:51,780 And this is something that from the Millennial generation 159 00:13:51,900 --> 00:13:57,220 went also into the Z generation with the presence very often 160 00:13:58,100 --> 00:14:02,100 of forms of protest that are also forms 161 00:14:02,300 --> 00:14:07,340 in which direct interactions are facilitated. 162 00:14:08,700 --> 00:14:11,260 So, long types of protest 163 00:14:12,340 --> 00:14:17,740 are also made of moments of interactions and exchanges 164 00:14:18,020 --> 00:14:20,540 face to face by the activists. 165 00:14:21,128 --> 00:14:24,840 How can social movements effectively defend civil liberties 166 00:14:24,865 --> 00:14:27,873 and protect their protests from police violence? 167 00:14:29,720 --> 00:14:32,660 I think communication is one of these forms. 168 00:14:32,780 --> 00:14:40,940 What we saw in the protest against the assassination of George Floyd 169 00:14:42,140 --> 00:14:48,100 is that what was very important was that the killing was documented. 170 00:14:52,183 --> 00:15:00,060 This very skilled generation is also very careful 171 00:15:00,340 --> 00:15:06,980 in acquiring and preserving saving knowledge 172 00:15:07,220 --> 00:15:09,900 which is also particularly important 173 00:15:10,100 --> 00:15:15,660 because it is a type of knowledge that is more able to stimulate emotions, 174 00:15:16,180 --> 00:15:18,700 negative but also positive ones. 175 00:15:19,340 --> 00:15:23,140 So, in a period of infodemic 176 00:15:23,380 --> 00:15:30,024 that is produced on the several challenges 177 00:15:30,048 --> 00:15:33,060 from the pandemic to the war, 178 00:15:33,580 --> 00:15:38,300 I think that what is very important 179 00:15:38,420 --> 00:15:43,380 in terms of documenting, of opposing repression 180 00:15:43,500 --> 00:15:47,060 is documenting repression and making it visible 181 00:15:47,380 --> 00:15:53,420 and providing alternative knowledge and counter-information. 182 00:15:57,090 --> 00:16:03,620 The process of Assange is an example of how much repression 183 00:16:03,980 --> 00:16:10,140 connects activism to the freedom of the Press. 184 00:16:11,900 --> 00:16:16,340 The Black Lives Matter protest could also be taken as an example 185 00:16:16,420 --> 00:16:20,100 of how repressions can be resisted 186 00:16:20,180 --> 00:16:26,940 because it is not just a matter of denouncing what happened 187 00:16:27,060 --> 00:16:30,780 and collecting evidence of repression itself, 188 00:16:31,140 --> 00:16:38,060 but, then, it is also very much a matter of spreading this information. 189 00:16:42,298 --> 00:16:51,060 And the successful global campaign around the assassination of George Floyd 190 00:16:51,740 --> 00:16:59,060 was also indicating that the message had then to be spread 191 00:16:59,380 --> 00:17:03,540 through different channels and in different forms. 192 00:17:04,620 --> 00:17:07,500 For instance, what we saw in our research 193 00:17:07,980 --> 00:17:11,460 was that memory was very important for young people, 194 00:17:11,620 --> 00:17:18,660 connecting the memories of specific acts of repressions with previous ones 195 00:17:19,540 --> 00:17:23,940 and also connecting generational experiences 196 00:17:24,020 --> 00:17:27,780 with different forms of repressions. 197 00:17:27,940 --> 00:17:31,660 And I think this is particularly relevant 198 00:17:31,740 --> 00:17:38,420 because besides the state forms of repressions 199 00:17:38,660 --> 00:17:45,780 that activists are more accustomed to, like repression of street protest, 200 00:17:46,060 --> 00:17:51,900 there are, more and more, different forms of repressions 201 00:17:52,020 --> 00:18:00,180 through harassment and stigmatisation in the mass media. 202 00:18:00,340 --> 00:18:03,780 The pacifist movement is undergoing 203 00:18:03,900 --> 00:18:08,580 this very strong forms of repressions in this moment. 204 00:18:09,060 --> 00:18:12,740 And there are also what many movements denounce 205 00:18:13,020 --> 00:18:16,660 as the broad forms of repressing rights. 206 00:18:16,860 --> 00:18:20,420 From the new generations of women movements 207 00:18:22,228 --> 00:18:26,099 denouncing violence on women 208 00:18:26,123 --> 00:18:30,522 and other form of repression, 209 00:18:31,540 --> 00:18:35,780 to the physical forms of assassinations, 210 00:18:35,940 --> 00:18:40,860 like the assassinations of activists 211 00:18:40,885 --> 00:18:45,541 related to the climate justice movement in the South 212 00:18:45,566 --> 00:18:48,446 by the government but also by private actors. 213 00:18:50,180 --> 00:18:54,420 I am also thinking about the racist assassinations and so on. 214 00:18:54,820 --> 00:19:00,540 I think that resisting repressions goes also beyond resisting state repressions 215 00:19:00,620 --> 00:19:06,980 and imply thinking about how to resist 216 00:19:07,260 --> 00:19:12,100 and oppose private forms of repressions, cultural forms of repressions.