The Playful Politics of Memes: Introduction to special issue
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
Documents
- Mortensen & Neumayer accepted version 2021
49.6 KB, Word document
This special issue emphasizes memes as an avenue for researching vernacular expressions of the political. Memes disrupt and reimagine politics in humorous ways. Spreading across platforms, they confirm, contest and challenge political power and hierarchies. In this introduction, we contend that playfulness connects the humorous and the political in memes. While memes may be created to disrupt, challenge, and reimagine politics in a humorous way, we argue for a critical examination of how they playfully demarcate and move frontiers between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the political. Memes constitute a playful activity that follows a shared set of rules and gives a (shared) voice, which may create togetherness and political identities but also increase polarization. As their template travels, memes continue to appropriate new political contexts and to (re)negotiate frontiers in the political.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Journal | Information, Communication & Society |
Volume | 24 |
Issue number | 16 |
Pages (from-to) | 2367-2377 |
ISSN | 1369-118X |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |
Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk
No data available
ID: 281811081