The digital racist fellowship behind the anti-Aboriginal internet memes

Al-Natour, Ryan

doi:10.1177/1440783320964536

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Memes have also been the subject of exploration for their manifestations of sexism, racism, and fringe political positions (Al-Natour, 2021;Askanius, 2021;Drakett et al, 2018;Greene, 2019;Moody-Ramirez et al, 2021;Siddiqi et al, 2018). Methodologically, memes have primarily been examined using semiotic analysis (Calimbo, 2016;Cannizzaro, 2016), discourse analysis (Destira et al, 2021;El-Masry, 2021;Huntington, 2016;Milner, 2013;Moreno-Almeida, 2021;Procházka, 2016), and content analysis (Al-Natour, 2021;Askanius, 2021;Brubaker et al, 2018;Norstrom & Sarna, 2020;Siddiqi et al, 2018;Wiggins, 2016). Relevant to this study, memes have previously been examined for their representation of mental health themes (Adams, 2019), and have specifically been used for the study of college students (Ask & Abidin, 2018;Smith, 2021).…”

Section: The Study Of Memesmentioning

confidence: 99%

High Impact, Low Mood: An Analysis of Graduate Student Attitudes and Perceptions Through PHD Memes

Maples

2023

IJDS

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Aim/Purpose: Graduate students face immense pressures and challenges as part of the graduate school experience, with few avenues to express their frustrations. While the crisis of graduate student mental health is well-documented quantitatively, and the stresses of graduate school are explored on the institutional level, there are few qualitative studies of these issues. Background: This study aims to explore graduate student attitudes and perceptions about graduate school and academia through the analysis of niche, graduate student-focused memes. Theories of emotional selection, emotional contagion, and collective coping predict that the creation and sharing of niche-interest memes reflect dominant attitudes and perceptions within niche communities under stress. Methodology: This study utilizes content analysis to thematically categorize a sample of 208 meme images created by and posted to the social media account High-Impact PhD Memes. The data is additionally categorized to measure resonance – how well each image was received by the page audience – and visualized using bar codes. Contribution: This study offers a new method for examining the attitudes and perceptions of niche groups online by proposing the measurement of emotional resonance, presents a novel visualization for the presentation of thematic coding and offers a new means to analyze internet memes for both content and emotional resonance. Findings: Findings indicate that the most frequently occurring themes in niche memes are not necessarily the ones that most highly emotionally resonate with the niche community of interest. The population of current and recent graduate students following High-Impact PhD Memes most highly resonated with the issues of literature access, financial/employment stresses, and overwork. Impact on Society: The findings of this study should encourage both researchers and higher education administrators to consider memes as reflections of the emotional states and perceptions of graduate students both collectively and individually, given how they comment on current, pressing issues. Based on the findings here, memes could feasibly be used as elicitation materials in well-being assessments or qualitative research studies to better understand and prompt reflections on the perspectives of graduate students, and ultimately improve programming and supports for the population. Future Research: Future research could apply similar methods to study other niche groups under pressure that use memes as a means of collective coping in order to better understand their attitudes and perceptions. Groups such as LGBTQ+ people, those with niche political affiliations, and neurodivergent people could all be studied with a similar approach.

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Section: The Study Of Memesmentioning

confidence: 99%

High Impact, Low Mood: An Analysis of Graduate Student Attitudes and Perceptions Through PHD Memes

Maples

2023

IJDS

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“…Scholarship in recent years has investigated the role of social media in mediating, amplifying and perpetuating racism online (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas, 2021). Racism has proliferated across platforms, and types of content, with studies exploring the weaponisation of memes (Al-Natour, 2021; Nakamura, 2014), Instagram filters (Jerkins, 2015), ‘sexual racism’ on dating apps (Carlson, 2020), emoji’s (Matamoros-Fernández, 2018), algorithms (Noble, 2018) and racist technology laws and business practises (Volpe et al, 2021). In Australia, studies on the social media experiences of Indigenous Australians have found that social media facilitates widespread racist abuse against Indigenous peoples (Carlson and Frazer, 2018; Kennedy, 2020).…”

Section: Social Media As a Tool Of Agency And A Site Of Racial Contes...mentioning

confidence: 99%

#BlackLivesMatter: Exploring the digital practises of African Australian youth on social media

Moran

Gatwiri

2022

Media, Culture & Society

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African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the anti-Black racism Black African young people endure in everyday Australia. By drawing on a multi-method approach consisting of social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews, this paper explores the use of social media by Black African young people (n=15) to visibilise their experiences of racism. We situate the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, as a significant ‘turning point’ when the social media practises of our participants radically transformed. Our findings indicate that prior to the murder of George Floyd, participants evoked careful boundaries around the type of racial content they posted for fear of the punishments or backlash that could occur if they disrupted the white racial comfort of their friends and followers. After the murder of Floyd, participants used the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement to visibilise their own experiences of anti-Black racism and racial violence in Australia, sharing content on social media that marked whiteness, demanded safety and challenged white silence and performative allyship.

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“…Yet, shame was also sometimes used to mock people who chose not to choke others, and specifically to mock men as too vanilla, too weak, or not masculine enough if they did not choke their (usually female) partner or did not do so with enough force or intensity. In this way, the memes we analyzed were reminiscent of prior research that has identified racism and misogyny in memes (Al-Natour, 2021;Andreasen, 2021;Moody-Ramirez et al, 2021;Yoon, 2016), suggesting that they may also contribute to harmful attitudes about women and people of color. That said, the use of humor may also indicate the intention to highlight and contradict racism and misogyny, including to bring to light problematic viewpoints or practices.…”

Section: Sexual Shame and Religionmentioning

confidence: 99%

#ChokeMeDaddy: A Content Analysis of Memes Related to Choking/Strangulation During Sex

et al. 2022

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Recent research indicates that some young people initially learn about sexual choking through Internet memes. Thus, a qualitative content analysis was performed on 316 visual and textual memes collected from various social media websites and online searches to assess salient categories related to choking during sex. We identified nine main categories: communication, gendered dynamics, choking as dangerous, choking as sexy, sexualization of the nonsexual, shame and worry, romance/rough sex juxtaposition, choking and religious references, instructional/informational. Given that memes, through their humor, can make difficult topics more palatable and minimize potential harm in the phenomenon they depict, more concerted, synergistic effort that integrates media literacy into sexuality education programming on the potential risks that may ensue for those engaging in sexual choking is warranted. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10508-022-02502-5.

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The digital racist fellowship behind the anti-Aboriginal internet memes

Cited by 6 publications

References 37 publications

High Impact, Low Mood: An Analysis of Graduate Student Attitudes and Perceptions Through PHD Memes

High Impact, Low Mood: An Analysis of Graduate Student Attitudes and Perceptions Through PHD Memes

#BlackLivesMatter: Exploring the digital practises of African Australian youth on social media

#ChokeMeDaddy: A Content Analysis of Memes Related to Choking/Strangulation During Sex

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