Who speaks for Earth? : climate discourses and voice in Greta Thunberg’s speech in UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, 2019

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse Greta Thunberg’s speech, given in UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, 2019, to find climate change discourses and outside voices that surface in the speech. This paper will map out the pre-existing climate change discourses by looking into previous research on the subject and then compare these discourses to Thunberg’s speech. The analysis is conducted on a transcript of the speech that is hosted online at www.npr.org. The analysis of voices in the speech will be done with the methods of intertextuality and critical discourse analysis. The tools of analysis that are used in this paper are discussed by Pietikäinen and Mäntynen in Kurssi Kohti Diskurssia, and by Wodak and Meyer in Methods of Critical Discourse Studies.