PhD Thesis — “Creative digital labour of meme making”
University of Edinburgh
My doctoral project is an ethnography of Instagram’s niche-meme community. It explores how niche-memes facilitate the creation of new markets and mutual-aid networks, and become sites of online public intellectualism.
I’ve gathered some links, abstracts and pieces that I’ve written here. These are either based on or inspired by my field work online.
Selected Abstracts
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Presentation: Art Worlds Online: Memes, Labour and Politics
British Sociological Association Annual Conference (2020/2021)
There exists a specific category of absurdist and subversive meme art on “post-internet” (Connor 2017, Olson 2018) Instagram. Created by a community of internet artists (i.e. The Bottom Text Collective @thebottomtext), these memes seek to alienate Instagram’s mainstream, viral-meme consuming audience through grotesque aesthetics and transgressive subject matters. I define these memes as "niche- memes".
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Presentation: Digital patronage and counter-cultural entrepreneurs online
ENDL-3: Unboxing AI: Understanding Artificial Intelligence. Graduate Colloquium (November 7, 2020)
My doctoral project is a qualitative examination of “countercultural entrepreneurs” on Instagram. Through in-depth interviews and digital ethnography, I explore how a specific community of Anglophone “niche”- meme creators on Instagram use entrepreneurial logic and countercultural production to create a network of patrons and artists.
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Presentation: The Meme-ing of Feminism: Humour on Instagram
New Directions Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh (2019)
It is safe to say that the internet has grown in depth and influence since 2007, but why did the meme go from a simple joke about something like cats being jerks, to satirical, visual collages about people trying to navigate the pressures of mental illness through Jungian psychoanalysis and intersectional feminism?