Decolonizing resilience: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of Indigenous Australian social media activism

Climate change has historically had a great impact on discussions of the goals and pathways of Australian development (Beeson and Macdonald 2013). In particular, recent climate-induced environmental disasters, such as the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire crisis, have called for the need to bring clarity to the concepts used to negotiate these discussions. This is especially the case of terms such as resilience and vulnerability. In particular, the neoliberal use of the term resilience and the representation of Indigenous Australian peoples as vulnerable has arguably damaged the possibility of Indigenous self-representation and agency in discussions about climate change (Berkes et al. 2003; Anderies et al. 2006). Moreover, it has also often led to crisis interventions being inadequate or inappropriate, especially through the failure to take account of Indigenous epistemologies in risk-reduction and management. This involves acknowledging that climate-induced environmental disasters are not only environmental but social crises produced by neoliberal and neocolonial social, economic and political conditions (Sultana 2025). The study draws upon previous research which argues that the resort to the term resilience disguises the essence of the issue: power relations and the behaviour of different actors with differing levels of power (Reid 2012, Evans and Reid 2014, Chandler and Reid 2016). Yet, its aim is to examine the ways in which social media are appropriated during environmental disasters to connect and increase social connectivity, amplifying the public spheres’ attention for the social and political cause, and creating a space for framing and reframing resilience and vulnerability. It explores how social media users contributed to reframing climate change resilience during the crisis. The analysis will be carried out by analysing a corpus, specifically compiled to study the representation of Indigenous Australian resilience in climate change news and social media discourse during the Australian Black Summer (2019-2020).