- 1 The SFSIC Study and Research Group “Communication, Environment, Science and Society.”
- 2 In addition to five symposiums already organised by the above-mentioned group, there have been publ (...)
1The field of information and communications science is showing growing interest in ecological issues as can be seen by the emergence of research groups on the topic,1 as well as a range of recent symposiums and publications.2 The connection between research and teaching lies at the heart of the work of teaching-researchers, and this paper presents a pedagogical experiment that has been ongoing for two years in the class “Analysis of media discourse and mechanisms” offered in the second year of the master’s course “Media, language and societies of the university” at the Paris-Pantheon-Assas University.
2This methodological class uses varied teaching methods (field trips outdoors, invited speakers from the NGO sector, etc.) and focuses on the creation of digital content. After presenting the main trends in media coverage of contemporary ecological issues, it became clear that ecological issues are almost exclusively approached through the lens of human beings and their interests. The large panoply of living beings is often glossed over or they are addressed as a resource from a resolutely instrumental perspective. The category of “living beings” being so vast and all-encompassing (lumping together single-cell organisms, plants, fungi and animals without taking into account their specificities), it can in effect obscure various dominations endured, in particular by animals. For this reason, it was decided to focus on animals, by exploring our relationships with animality in a highly anthropized urban environment. Memes were targeted as they are today a common format in digital culture, and the digital content to be created was to centre on animals, the core focus of a dedicated Instagram page: L’anthropo_scenes.3
3The aim of this module and the content produced is to interrogate the idea according to which animality represented a degraded or depreciated human state (Chanteloup & Mounet, 2020), by attempting through discourse and image to represent the possibility of equal consideration being accorded to animal interests (Singer et al., 2012). On which animals were we to focus and with what visual orientation? How could animal agency be communicated in a meme, without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism? In which ways did prejudices, the “before discourse”) or prediscourses, about animals manifest?
4This type questioning is in line with the hypothesis that the mere fact of being interested in animals is likely to encourage greater consideration, and even affect, towards them. Looking at animals from a different perspective can reduce the artificial distance that separates them from humans, encouraging positive dispositions and emotions towards them (esteem, respect, sympathy). While scientific research remains indispensable to protect animal interests, the exclusive focus cannot just be on knowing animals better; it is also necessary to ensure that representations that highlight our common destiny and interdependencies emerge. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold has stated: “If we want to arrive one day at an ecology capable of reconnecting with the processes of life itself, we must descend from the heights of rationalist abstraction to return to an active and dynamic relationship with our environment” (our translation, Ingold, 2012, p. 15).
5This paper, being the fruit of pedagogical work, uses two levels of enunciation: “I” is used for my word as the author presenting a process of reflection and creation, while “we” designates a collective that includes the students and myself.
6In the course of their history, and in particular during the twentieth century, the humanities and social sciences have developed three approaches towards animals: a first approach is by animals (interest in animals as a material and symbolic support to human societies); a second approach is for animals (where the aim is to liberate animals from human domination); and a third approach is with animals (highlighting the common worlds between humans and animals) (Chanteloup & Mounet, 2020). Philosophy, for its part, has developed reflections on environmental ethics, understood as a school of thought which tries to “encourage the development of moral consideration for beings thus far excluded from the community of ethics and to assert the rights of nature” (Beau, 2020, p. 385). The field identifies three main strands: anthropocentrism, biocentrism and ecocentrism. The first, which wields hegemonic power in Western societies, places humans at the centre of all reflection and envisages non-humans as a stock of resources that can be drawn from infinitely. This anthropocentric perspective has taught us “to live with a living world whose vocation is to be exploited and dominated” (Devictor, 2023, p. 88). Biocentrism and ecocentrism, by contrast, invite us to consider non-humans as worthy of moral consideration in and of themselves, as they hold intrinsic value and not just value derived from their supposed disposition to become resources useful to human beings (Tollis, 2020).
7Having set out these preliminaries, the production of memes in a teaching context is justified by the fact that memes represent a specific form of digital signs. The nature of memes is profoundly semiotic: they are vectors of intertextual and hypertextual relations, through which the discourses they subvert may or not be identifiable (Simon, 2021). They possess three characteristics which contribute to their popularity: replication (formal repetition), transformation (their modifiable nature) and circulation (Gautier & Siouffi, 2016). Reading and interpreting memes involves a continuous passage “from image code to text code, [...] from sequential to spatial” (Rabatel, 2022, §15). Far from being just about humour, memes possess an argumentative dimension (Simon & Wagener, 2023), often inviting us to question, critique, reflect and even espouse certain causes (Lippert & Wagener, 2023). Designed both to make us laugh and to make us act, memes have an imminently pragmatic character (Jost, 2022).
8Why then create memes about animals? Animals may be frequently used in media and advertising, public communication and by the cultural industries (Fantin et al., 2023), but they nonetheless occupy a subaltern position in our contemporary societies. The political scientist Bruno Villalba speaks of an imaginary deeply anchored in the West that for centuries has justified the political downgrading of animals. Their subalternity even constituted a model that allowed for the construction of “sub-human” categories: people considered as savages who could be civilised and therefore colonised (Villalba, 2020).
9Through these digital creations, my aim is to incite students to research the species selected so as to learn more about their physiological characteristics, their environments, their social capacities and their languages. I dedicated the first sessions of the module to media coverage of ecological issues (climate change, biodiversity loss, pesticides, etc.) through an analysis of three types of enunciators: conventional or specialised media (Le Monde, Socialter, Le Vert Média, Reporterre); online satirical media (Malheurs actuels, Ministère de l’Écologie Déserté); and social media accounts of environmental NGOs (French League for the Protection of Birds, Sea Shepherd, Association for the Protection of Wild Animals, etc.).
10For the first year of the experiment, “unloved” animals who incite fear, disgust or contempt were chosen: black-widow spiders, hyenas, pigeons, praying mantises and blobfish. Black widows, for example, generated a lot of discussion because of generally strong feelings of repulsion towards spiders. The students of that year’s class, all women, welcomed the project, which diverged from conventional forms of assessment, like tests and projects, enthusiastically
11For the second year, animals that are referred to as “livestock” were chosen: pigs, cows, chickens and horses. This was not an obvious choice; many other categories of animals were suggested. Some of the students expressed fears about working on livestock animals, conscious of the fact that they would be confronted with distressing information about the fates of such animals within the food industry. For some years now, animal rights groups, and in particular L214, have been active in producing proof of acts of cruelty that livestock are subjected to in slaughterhouses, with the aim of empowering audiences through audiovisual means.
12The guidelines to get the work of creation going were the following: undertake research on the selected animals using a diversity of sources and try to adopt the point of view of the animals (Rabatel, 2009) to respect their dignity and their interests. A humorous tone was to be preferred over moralising and guilt-inducing discourses. While the students were accorded creative freedom, I did ask for initial reflections in the form of a brief detailing for each team an editorial vision, the angle of approach and a visual identity. I was surprised to read in these documents that younger generations considered memes as already aged and “old-fashioned,” rendered “uncool” by newer formats proposed by TikTok and Snapchat. Being the main users of these platforms, the students interpreted the meme device based on their own digital practices.
13The output from the first and second year have many elements in common: code switching, with a mix of French and English; the use of emojis both in memes and in captions; and borrowing of certain codes from the comic book world, such as speech bubbles. Some memes were based on templates available online (“Disaster Girl,” “Two Buttons Meme,” “Drake Meme,” “Femme Calcul”) while others were original works. The verbal component was sometimes integrated within the visual (speaking characters, juxtaposition of works), or sometimes separated from the image in the form of metatext (borders, margins, banners). In 2022, twenty-eight memes were created, with the majority being still images (photos, photogrammes, drawings), while in 2023, thirty-six works were published, with the majority being moving images (videos, GIFs).
14The students from the first class (class of 2022) expressed a desire to establish a link between their feminist engagement and the lack of consideration accorded to the animals they worked on. In effect, three of the animals from the first year are used as vectors of sexist stereotypes supporting a vision of women as inferior. The black-widow and the praying mantis are species known for their cannibalistic practices towards males—the females eat their partners after intercourse. These animals are used to support the stereotype of women as materialistic and heartless, seeking the elimination of their companions to take their wealth. Hyenas, for their part, are considered noisy, jeering and opportunistic animals. The research on them showed that hyenas live in matriarchal societies, and that the female of the spotted hyena species had the particularity of having a sexual organ resembling the male organ. This led to an interrogation of why hyenas are so discredited, and the hypothesis that it was because the only politically acceptable model of organisation is one of male domination.
15These animals gave rise to memes in the form of gazettes, such as the New Hyena Times (parody of the American newspaper), as well as fictional profiles like “Hyena_off.” The same model was extended to all the “unloved” animals, with The_Pigeon_off, or The Blobfish_off (“off” being short for “official,” as used to distinguish celebrity profiles managed by celebrities themselves from those created by fans). The Blobfish_off profile presents news on whale attacks in Reunion Islands or tiger-shark attacks in Hawaii, using cuttings from screenshots taken from existing media. The caption “POV: Humans discover that oceans are inhabited”4 in an ironic tone highlights how human beings commonly consider themselves the sole inhabitants of this world. The blobfish was a vector for reflection on the overexploitation of oceans: “These giant trawlers which are emptying the Channel of its fish” is written across the image of an immense trawler at the top of the meme, followed by a second sequence beneath in which a blobfish says: “No more traffic jams in the abysses 🤣.”5
16Code switching sometimes also included words in Verlan slang (“Me and my pinecos quand on pose pour Instagram”6), or onomatopoeia imitating the sounds produced by the animals, as in the case of the pigeon: “Rrrou-rrrou. Do you have cinq minutes to talk about le monde au balcon?”7 One of the teams focused its work on the links between what humans perceive as beautiful and our links with certain animals: “Animals and beauty privilege: why do we prefer cute animals?” That caption is superposed on a photo of a white Persian cat, looking grumpy and wearing a muslin cloth around its head. The image evokes Grumpy Cat, a cat famous for its cranky look. Underneath is written “Deciphering Mr Blobby” with a blobfish drawn in pink, wearing classes, its plumpness and its smile lending it a good-natured look.8
17For the memes focused on cash animals, our work in 2023, an intertextual trend emerged, consisting in the borrowing of codes from film and TV culture (series like Friends, cartoons like The Simpsons and Scooby-Doo, reality TV shows like “Secret Story” and recent films such as Barbie and Mario Bros). Most of the teams decided to couple the meme (placed as the first image of the carousel) with educative and informative content (the images that follow, accessible only from the top image). One of the teams, for example, decided to focus on animal languages, proposing a graphic mini-series titled “Zoo-m of the week.” Another team opened up its carousel with the phrase “Et oui, Jamy!” taking a well-known phrase from the documentary series Le Monde de Jamy.9 Many teams highlighted the physiological, cognitive, social and emotional characteristics of livestock animals: this was the case for instance with a meme about the speed at which horses can run. On top of a still image of galloping horses is written “Usain Bolt in 2009: *37.58 km/h*,” coupled with a moving image of two people running with difficulty to the right. The first statement disappears and a second appears: “Horses since ages: *70km/h*,” while a man appears in the foreground, running so fast that he quickly overtakes the other two runners.10
18The place of animal emotions and the capacity of animals to understand human emotions was also the subject of many works. This is the case with a meme based on the cartoon series Scooby-Doo, which is composed of a scene typical of the show: the character Fred Jones unmasking a ghost. In the centre of the meme is written “Let’s see ce qui trahit les emotions de cete human”;11 the meme ends with the writing “Their sweat.” The caption reads: “After humans reading the emotions of hens, now it is horses that read the emotions of humans! Our sweat says a lot about us, and equines seem to understand this well 🐎🐴.”12 Mixing the emotions of animals and domination imposed by human beings, another meme has the caption “Mother cow trying to stay calm quand son veau s’éloigne de 2m,” accompanying a photo of visibly terrorised young woman.13
19Some of the works point the lens on animal agency, thus interrogating the injunction of docility to which particularly livestock animals are subjected. This is the case with the meme which states: “POV: Horses when you ask them to describe themselves other than ‘sensitive and man’s friend’,” while a video shows a black woman giving a speech. At first calm, she soon gets worked up and gesticulates angrily.14 A second meme shows a video of a pig throwing itself off a truck that is transporting it. The fall is a bit rough, but the pig gets up and runs off into the bushes. The text that is placed at the top of the video states in English: “Basic human: we’re all gonna die. Pig: hold my beer.” The caption “#balancetonporc🐽”15 is taken from the French feminist hashtag that encouraged women to speak out against sexist and sexual violence, thus establishing a link between undoing animal subalternity and women’s subalternity. Through its act of escape, the pig in effect challenges the fatality of its destiny. Lastly, another category of memes highlight the continuum between other animals and human animals: “When a pig learns that they have ✨95%✨ of DNA in common with man,” having as a subtext the fact that the difference between one group and the other is no doubt less one of nature but simply one of degree (Pignier, 2018).
20This exercise, which has the ambition of being replicated, was aimed at encouraging collective reflection on the preponderance of humans in the definition of what makes sense on Earth (Descola, 2011). The editorial visions developed by the students produced epideictic discourses on animals which all concurred on the fact that these individuals deserved respect. The students discovered characteristics of the animals that they were not aware of: their language, their sociability, their emotional life. This learning was aimed at reducing the distance that separates urban dwellers from animal alterities which invite us to consider them as such. In this, the production of digital works about animals may be envisaged as part of a reparational approach (Michalon, 2017). It unfolds on a visual plane what the philosopher Corine Pelluchon calls “the age of the living” marking the passage from a schema of domination (on humans and nature) towards a schema of consideration (Pelluchon, 2021). In this sense, I concur with Bruno Villalba when he affirms that “animals need supportive third persons to make themselves heard” (Villalba, 2021, p. 252). Through this pedagogical experiment, I attempt to encourage future journalists and communicators to take part in the responsibility that we have towards animals.
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