April 4 / Ainehi Edoro-Glines (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “Literary Form & the Social Media Imaginary”

What does literature bring to our understanding of social media? How does social media open up new ways of understanding literary form? The talk looks at the ways in which social media both challenges and illuminates literary form and concepts. 

April 13 / Christopher Cañete Rodriguez Kelly (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “Heaven knows I'm miserable now": #nichetok, #corecore, and Thoughts on the Digital Mundane”

Recent memetic trends on TikTok overtly or obliquely represent crises in mental health.  Is the meme aesthetic, generally criticized for its numbing effects, suited for the representation of mental health crises as an everyday occurrence? 

April 20 /  Daniel Adleman (University of Toronto): “Is the Memosphere Susceptible to Conspiratorial Thinking? The Case of QAnon Memes”

Memes are, it is often said, used to promote conspiracy theories. What is a conspiracy theory and what distinguishes it from other modes of theorizing about the world? And accordingly, how might memes facilitate conspiratorial thinking patterns?  The talk will engage these questions by considering the case of QAnon memes.

April 26 / Sophie Schweiger (Yale University): “Marx & the Meme Machine”

Schweiger is interested in what we can learn from the surge in popularity of (vulgar-)marxist/socialist memes about the shifting attitudes of meme users about sharing/property/ownership. The talk delineates a “generational shift” about the propriety of a “sharing economy” which Schweiger relates, in part, to the specificity of memetic circulation and, also, to the privacy terms and property norms which underlie and structure memetic production and circulation.

April 27 / Seb Franklin (King’s College, London): “Freedom and Circulation: Marx as Meme Theorist”

This presentation focuses on the meme’s mode of circulation, in which lots of uncoordinated actions add up to a certain level of virality and a certain level of intelligibility. As Wark and Wark put it, “No one hand guides [memes]. They appear as if the instrument of an unconscious drive.” This mode of circulation is remarkably similar to the dynamics of the capitalist form of society described by Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century: a form of society that, unlike, say, feudalism, appears to emerge out of the uncoordinated actions of free individuals. Identifying the continuities between meme circulation and the form of society can help us to sketch a deep history of the meme.

May 2 / Kareem Khubchandani (Tufts): “Aunties Online”

Why do so many young South Asian TikTokers make memes about their aunties? Who are aunties and why do they matter in telling the larger story of the diaspora? And what memes do aunties employ themselves? This talk explores the abundance of digital aunties, intergenerational tensions enacted through memes, and the aesthetics of aunty memes.

May 11 / Christine Goding-Doty (New School):  “Cake or Fake? Memes, Coloniality, and the Hyperrreal”

Examines the genealogy of "actually cake" memes as an offshoot of "oddly satisfying" memes, which depict moments of improbable perfection, with the effect of habituating us to conspicuous consumption and anaesthetising us to its violent ends. Where “oddly satisfying” memes enable a colonial relationality, in which one affects things without being affected, this is only true up to a point with "actually cake" memes; their irony and its ambivalence offer promising possibilities for a more reciprocal online relationality.

May 18/ Ryan Milner (College of Charleston): “The World After The World Made Meme: A Q&A with Ryan Milner”

A discussion with Ryan Milner on the trajectory his work has followed, and the trajectories internet cultures have followed, since the 2016 publication of The World Made Meme.