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Introduction

Performativity, domestication and resistance in memes

The lives and vitality of memes (vol. 2.)
Laurence Allard , Irene De Togni , Fabrizio Defilippi , Lucas Fritz , Adrien Péquignot  et Gabriele Stera
Traduction de Yarri Kamara
Cet article est une traduction de :
Performativités, domestications et résistances mémétiques [fr]
Autre(s) traduction(s) de cet article :
Performatività, addomesticamento e resistenze memetiche [it]
Performatividade, domesticações e resistências meméticas [pt]

Texte intégral

1. How can we make sense of the politics of meme battles?

  • 1 From end of June 2024, many videos were shared initially by Crawly (@crawl.possessed) on Tiktok and (...)
  • 2 For the music score, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWi_wCtLW90.
  • 3 Lore, an abbreviation of folklore, is the universe (in a wide sense) that a cultural object compose (...)
  • 4 Some accounts even created videos and highly complex sagas to explain how the battle played out. Se (...)

1If you spent time on TikTok or Instagram around mid-2024, you perhaps came across videos showing strange battles between gnomes and knights. A series of videos that quickly went viral, called Crawly the Green Wizard Gnome,1 feature a bearded man with exaggerated eyebrows, wearing a green coat and a white wizard hat; he appears suddenly inside a shop belonging to major fast fashion brand and proceeds to wreak havoc, running around everywhere, especially in the areas of the shop forbidden to the general public. The gnome is bent over and holds in his hand a strange instrument, a sort of net used for catching butterflies, which he brandishes as if it were a weapon or magic wand. The green gnome bounces to the rhythm of music,2 as if he had been summoned by the mysterious forces of the web through this troubling melody. From time to time, the gnome utters incomprehensible words in a sharp eerie voice. He is often accompanied by other gnomes, dressed like himself, who help him disrupt shop activities before staff can stop them. The video series also features another group of characters, just as enigmatic: knights. The knights are the sworn enemies of the gnomes in a battle of which neither the motivations nor the rules are ever specified. In their shiny aluminium armour, the tall knights chase after the gnomes to stop them carrying out their acts of malice. This story line was quickly taken up by a wide variety of profiles and accounts creating all sorts of content to feed the lore3 of this imaginary enmity.4

2On first glance, this meme trend represents a simple virtual spat between extravagant gnomes and cosplaying knights. However, under the trend’s apparent levity lie profound social dynamics: of the countless trends that emerge each week, that of Gnomes vs. Knights for us seems to illustrate particularly well the ambiguity of meme battles (Arkenbout & Scherz, 2022) that internet users engage in.

3The social spaces engendered by digital media are not solely home to cute cats (Simon, 2024) or comical figures like El Risitas (Marcoccia, 2024); they also serve as a platform for expressing dispute and conflict, with sometimes harmful consequences on our online and offline lives. In some cases, the intentions of the creators of the memes involved go well beyond getting laughs, although the agendas of meme trends, as well as the context of their interactions (Wagener, 2022, p. 9), are not always evident to all users.

4Undertaking multiple back-and-forths between connected and un-connected spaces, memes can become powerful vectors of ideologies that polarise and politicise. Vectors of shared social meanings (Defilippi & Fritz, 2022), they give rise to (precarious and temporary) communities that may construct themselves negatively, that is, against specific targets (undesirable categories, ideas and visions of the world). The battle of gnomes against knights enacts an individual and collective desire to “take a stand, above all against something, following social trends that are affective rather than rational. This dynamic characterises a good share of contemporary meme output. 

5From this perspective, the battle of gnomes and knights invites us to reflect on two key points. The first concerns the presence of other characters (fairies, magicians, elves, animals, human beings, etc.) who take part in the battle, declaring to have “chosen their side—“The magicians chose Gnomes. Everyone, without fail, is called on to choose a side in the confrontation, as if the destiny of the world depended on it. Choice is not optional, but necessary. This phenomenon both reflects and fuels online and offline polarisation, with users dividing into factions, symbolising a growing trend towards digital tribalisation. This type of meme, all while using humour, enacts certain contemporary social tensions, and in some cases goes so far as serving as a means for coded and polemical discourse. The obligation to choose sides and to wage battle against the other is a metaphor for the contemporary condition of polarisation, imposed by the dominant discourse, and which through binary choice suggests an apparent lack of alternatives in many realms of civic and political action. Polarisation masks other possible forms of life where a multitude of points of view could coexist, where such a multitude would be perceived as a richness, and where everyone would seek to identify their own “aspect blindness (Wittgenstein, 2014, p.300) in understanding anothers point of view rather than affirming that ones own point of view was naturally (and therefore uncontestably) the best and should prevail (Saemmer et al., 2022).

6The second point concerns the evolution of memes and of battles. The Green Wizard Gnome meme, like many others, was quickly subjected to a sort of institutionalisation, with the emergence of videos showing gnomes in funny scenes from daily life, in ways that were relatively disconnected from the original bellicose lore. Moreover, the memes success led certain brands to produce content using the meme, thus transforming it into a marketing tool through resemantisation: gnomes became advertising mascots.5

  • 6 This is the case, for example, in the following video in which a gnome and a knight disrupt busines (...)
  • 7 Through their subversive practices, situationists sought to go beyond art by constructing practical (...)
  • 8 This phrase is inspired by the title of Jack Goody’s 1977 book (1979 for the French edition) – The (...)
  • 9 The first issue of the L’internationale situationniste journal pointed out that “The concept of sit (...)

7The meaning of the gnomes incursions into shops and restaurants thereby changes: they are no longer disruptions of capitalist order,6 (inadvertent) heirs of situationist practices,7 but rather an instrument that reinforces the logics of commercial marketing. These forms of meme co-option may lead to the professionalisation of the field, which however, is at odds with the spontaneity of the movement, freezing meanings, domesticating the savage potential,8 and thus countering the circulation and resemantisation of memes, which is actually what lies at the heart of this cultural form (Jost, 2022). We see at work here forces, notably described by situationists, that enact a tension between a creative movement and its institutionalization.9 

8What takes place is the risky and potentially problematic passage from meme do-it-yourself driven by a spirit of participation to forms of meme engineering at the service of commercial and political ends. Like the battle between gnomes and knights, any performance, even of the naivest kind, can get caught up in the mechanisms of capitalist or institutional capture. At the same time, the fact that commercial and institutional actors take up meme trends, to us is a sign of growing awareness of the power of memes.

2. From rebirth to reproduction of memes: between performance, domestication and resistance

9The Hybrid issue, dedicated to memes, that you are reading is the sequel to an earlier issue titled Birth and Rebirth of Memes. The lives and vitality of memes published in November 2024. That issue focused on defining memes and their perimeters, the diverse forms of memetic life that populate our communicational spaces, as well as the processes of meme creation. In this second volume, we want to bring the communicational object that is the meme into the arena of reception, to carefully observe from that vantage point how meme representations, social lives, and the practices associated with memes evolve.

10In the first volume, we chose a resolutely pragmatist approach, attentive to socio-memetic transactions, to regenerate a well-known expanded biological theory of evolution, which is at the origin of the concept of meme. In effect, Richard Dawkins initial reflection in The Selfish Gene (1976) crowned biology the science capable of explaining not just the life of living beings but also that of cultural forms, through replication and natural selection. These concepts, inspired by the field of biology, contributed to the development of certain metaphors such as that of “virality and the “contagion of ideas which seem to imply that individuals or communities are passively infected by the digital entities that memes represent.

11Here, we have not abandoned a certain vitalist approach; however, it is not the biologising approach of Dawkins, but the political approach of Dewey, for whom the experience of aesthesis is that of life itself, that is adopted. It is through this optic that memes, companions of our digital lives, are understood.

12In our attempt to reflect on both memes and lives, to go beyond the binarity between images and organic bodies, the authors in the first volume invited us to reconstitute the “partial and multi-specific stories (Haraway, 2020) which lead to the birth of memes, to their circulation, their combination and their death. “Make memes not babies! was the slogan of issue 12, echoing the one formulated by Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble (2020), “Making Kin not babies! These memetic entities, both creatures and creations, hybrid and active entities, generative and persistent, which haunt our digital lives and link us to so many other companionships, benefit from being viewed through the perspective of new socio-digital kinships. Thus, emerged an outline of a new memetic cosmo-ontology, cyborgian and relational, between organicity and sociality, from the vibrational to the sympoietic. The issue aimed at presenting deployments of memetic vitality within techno-cultural configurations outside the fable of natural selection and beyond the separation of technique and culture. The three parts of issue 12 each dealt with a sequence in the chronological life of memes: their creation or their generation, their reinvention or their reincarnation, and their replication or their transmission. 

13The present issue, for its part, focuses on meme reception: a reception that is creative (Certeau, 1980), through which each use reactivates the memes power of action and recontextualises its meaning. If we consider memes as young tempestuous creatures possessing an instinctive vitality, springing forth from a free internet ecosystem, does that not suggest that their professionalisation and institutionalisation are signs of maturity, of entering a more “adult phase of a creative movement?

14With memes having lost their innocence, their reception will become an arena for meme battles (Lolli, 2017) in which strategies of the powerful—the knights—and tactics of the weak—the gnomes—clash. The spontaneous poiesis of private meme use is a testament to this as much as commercial and institutional control of memes.

15The gestures that are at the origin of meme practices are potentially losing their playful naivety: memes thus become tools for identity construction or weapons of persuasion; they can be subjected to cultural appropriation when premeditated reproduction or use serves specific commercial or educational aims.

16On the one hand, memes take part in the political game of influence:10 they are now present in debates on television channels, far from their original digital ecosystem. An integral part of geopolitical events, a companion to industrial developments guided by marketing campaigns, and a prop for discourse and ontological segmentations operated by dominant cultural groups on television, radio and in books, memes help to delineate the arenas of socio-technical confrontations (Akrich et al., 2006). They take part in building the balance of knowledge and power for involved actors, as well as in the construction of a new rhetorical arsenal made up of pop images and ironic posturing.

  • 11 The term architext originates from the semiotics of writing on screens and designates “standardised (...)

17On the other hand, memes standardise, proposing templates which can be personalised. Formal modifications of memes are gradually stabilising due to the fact that their reproduction is governed by the architext11 of widely used creation software and their evolution takes shape in socially regulated practices.

18Playful use of memes intersects with strategic recreation, in vitro. Next to this, one observes in vivo use of memes: performances that are still free, although no longer unthinking, which explore horizontality and popular agency. Thus unfolds an interplay of digital and social affordances, a continuous questioning of the power of action of social forms, and of their limits, of how they can be overcome, of the blind spots in their reproduction.

19In the context of digitalised media, these appropriations engender difficult to comprehend propagations and composite vitalities. Between audience enablement and strategic control, memes become means of speaking out, and tools for educating or controlling what is said. They are matrixed and characterised by creativity linked to the “re of repetition, of computational reproduction and social circulation (Colas-Blaise & Tore, 2021).

20The interrogations posed by the articles in this issue plunge us thus into the realm of media ecology. They consider the digital and extra-digital environments in which meme battles take shape, as well as the material and technical frameworks of their confrontations, the tools of creation and the profiles of audiences involved. The analysis of memes here tackles their performance (in terms of mobilising power) and their effectiveness (in terms of results achieved). It examines the social actors who shape these dynamics, while also examining how communication mechanisms and spaces are transformed by meme confrontations.

21Questions around the performance of memes are thus tied to study of their outcomes, effectiveness, and games of influence and persuasion. The articles are therefore interested not only in the social actors participating in these processes, but also in the changes to communication mechanisms and spaces that meme battles engender. Distinguishing between in vivo and in vitro memes thus allows us to better shed light on meme production through the prism of socio-technical tensions, industrial logics, culture battles and current wars (Biardzka et al., 2023).

22It follows that the terminology espoused in this issue, far from indicating two different meme essences, of which one would be more authentic than the other, actually insists on the “naturalist turn in meme production and analysis: a moment where memes are studied, produced and generated from “laboratories“—whether these are academic research laboratories, such as those that we are a part of, or laboratories of communication professionals aimed at optimizing, facilitating and organising the discourse and behaviours of their hosts.

23The rationalisation of meme analysis to which this issue contributes is in resonance with rationalisation of production tools, which are perhaps less tools of image design than tools of strategic communication. Conceiving of memes as a “companion species (Haraway, 2020), which evades usage by the model user (Gantier, 2015), are we perhaps entering a phase where “companion memes and “domestic memes coexist and intermix in a public sphere with complex contours?

24By taking up the opposition between in vivo and in vitro, this issue hopes to shed light on the intermixing of academia and industry through the prism of historic tensions of varying durations, of the spectre of wars and of the “sufferings of History (Haraway, 2020), of relations of exploitation and domination of non-humans, as well as of corporality and human biology. The issue also presents an opportunity to reflect on the place of academic language and its rationality in the alteration of meme ecosystems—and, in fine, to touch on the collective self-modification of the bodies of researchers through the prism of these (not so innocent) meme games and their mechanisms of production, whether these are WhatsApp conversations or museum dialogues.  

3. In vivo memes

25The first line of reflection taken up in this issue responds to questions on the natural and free condition of memes following their professionalisation and standardisation, on the social role of their spontaneous production, and on the power that their creators continue to keep. Savage memes are still found in the digital ecosystem, they still exist in their vital form; but where do we stand when faced with the meme, this info-communicational object, in its domesticated form?                                     

26Albin Wagener and Erica Lippert offer us a study on meme reception. Their research subscribes to an analytical perspective combining discourse analysis with lexicographic analysis. They analyse the emotions and imaginaries elicited by a corpus of memes on climate change. The results of their study show that, on the one hand, it is not always necessary to grasp a meme's cultural and contextual references to understand its key message; and on the other hand, that memes can play a significant role in dedramatising serious and complex topics, such as climate change, through their use of humour.

27Valentyna Dymytrova weaves together meme performance and warlike marches. As part of an analysis of the role of memes in the reconfiguration of affective communities, she studies corporeal choreography in a war context (in this case, the war in Ukraine). Her article in particular emphasises the way in which war alters the conditions of meme production, as well as its analytical frameworks: she thus invites us to reconsider the links between derision and destabilisation, between staging the body and resisting violence and death. Dymytrova shows us how memes contribute not only to socio-digital deployment of artistic war offensives, but also to forms of collective choreographic resistance—notably vocal—through which the war cry and its thanatopolitical affects—aggressivity, rejection and anger—are transformed into narratives about life and solidarity. 

28Jorge Sosa invites us to follow the iconic and memetic traces of the malandro, a paradoxical figure of Venezuelan folklore, and through this, specify the role played by memes in the evolution of Venezuelan religious and cultural practices. Through reinscribing the meme in its iconological vitality, he evokes the distinctive sociotechnical features of meme production in a non-European and non-American cultural territory. This cultural decentring opens up numerous epistemological issues for the analysis of memes and their vitality: the article shows the way in which their production and analysis is bound to a certain culture of the power of action of images, or even to the sacred dimension of images—the capacity of images to breathe life into things and to redefine their contours—as well as to a certain culture of the power of action (and suffering) of bodies—and in particular of the violence that informs and gives life to memes, in counterpoint to their humorous dimension. 

29Maximilian Schlüter presents the memification of the hegemonic masculine body through a genre of popular memes called “Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity” (RMEM). His analysis hones in on a corpus of short videos from masculinist communities active online around 2021. Schlüter explores the narrative construction in these videos and exposes a discourse on the body that validates bodybuilding culture and promotes physical exercise and fitness. Following the trope of the “overweight body, the strongly masculinist narrative is incorporated in and by the meme and reveals a corporeal dimension of these digital productions which the author observes “through the Lens of Bodies.

4. In vitro memes

30The second line of reflection interrogates the educational and institutional uses of memes. Here we take up once more the metaphor of biological weapons of war, we move from a biotic of forms to the synthetic life of the laboratory—controlled, studied and strategic. Commercial, professional and institutional actors adopt varying postures towards digital audiences and propose diverse forms of domestication of memes. The articles of this second volume analyse such reworking from different angles. The laboratory is not only the place of rational appropriation, but also one of experimentation, one of engineering. From necropolitics to the politics of life, the laboratory embodies a place of control over forms of life and death of memes. 

31Cécile Velley and Sarah Cordonnier observe the dissemination of meme output in the context of museums, through comparative study of French and Canadian heritage institutions. They show how memes have today become part of communication and mediation strategies of museum collections, revealing to us a humorous turn in heritage mediation that would seem to indicate the blurring of the boundary between visitors and internet users. This new opening up of institutions towards the memification of works in their collections now becomes a tool for digital activation of collections, and through that, a tool for educational dissemination and innovation in heritage mediation practices. Memes, in a museum context, vitalise works and, by extending institutional discourses which frame conservation, elicit new audiences.

32Stéphanie Marty offers us insight on the meeting of memes and marketing, through the study of the output of six brands that have used memes as branding tools. Meme production here shows itself to be a new terrain for marketing strategies, through which memes become essential modulators of advertising ecosystems. The advertising narrative finds itself reconfigured by dynamics of control operated by brands as much as by the transformative remixes of internet users. The viral life of memes intersects with commercial interests and with dynamics of building community through advertising by becoming a laboratory of strategies of attention capture and of providing narratives for consumer goods.  

33In the part “Vocaux croisés sur expériences vécues,” Étienne Candel and Gustavo Gomez-Mejia continue an academic dialogue started long ago through voices and avenues of research-creation. For this piece, they chose to work on the memory of memes which the two authors consider as being at the centre of the “sensorium of our techno-baroque times (players, GIF, screenshots). Their approach of research-creation takes the form of an asynchronous verbal discussion that emulates WhatsApp discussions: a succession of voice notes, as well as successive and non-sequential exchanges. The relationship between the intimate memory of memes and the social frameworks of a memory fitted out with different technosemiotic devices is explored in this way. While Candel and Gomez-Mejia say that they are not fully convinced of the academic standing of this “rendering—a work in its own right or preliminary discussion before undertaking “real work—they wished to share the “lived-in” character of these (ordinary, academic, creative) experiences by preserving a “vitality” in their methods of analysis.

34Lastly, to close the issue, Louis Le Corno through a review, returns to the second volume of the Critical Meme Reader II. Meme Tacticality (2022), edited by Chloë Arkenbout and Laurence Scherz. His review develops a reflection on the performativity of memes seen as potential arms and tools at the service of various causes. By taking the power of memes seriously, the book interrogates memes’ capacity to shape collective and political imaginaries, while also bringing to light important considerations on the difficult work of creation by the actors involved. Moreover, dialoguing with the articles of this issue allows us to return to our initial question, that is, what memes “make us, adding perhaps, a more programmatic question for the future: what is it that memes allow us to do?

5. Meme gaps and resistances

35This issue presents an occasion for self-reflection on the possibility of putting memes in vitro: as researchers, in what way can we address meme dynamics which seem to evade all attempts at rationalisation, which resist all formalisation and evolve rapidly and unpredictably? We tried to provide elements of an answer during the “No(us) Mèmes [Our Memes, Ourselves] study day that took place in October 2022, and then in dialogue with other authors in issues 12 and 13 of Hybrid.

36The articles published here attempt, each in their own way, to capture the complexity of the phenomena observed without flattening them, by trying to find suitable methodologies. These methodological amalgams, open to research-creation, represent both a situational analysis and a point of departure for future research on the topic. The existing gaps between memetic realities and our efforts to understand them show us that, in the end, meme production is still very lively: despite attempts to normalise the dynamics of popular creation, memes have not yielded to forms of standardisation and instrumentalisation, but continuously reinvent themselves.

  • 12 We can also add that the study of memes implies a level of mental labor (Neghabat & Miesenberger, 2 (...)

37This resistance stands both for commercial usage of memes as for our academic attempts to circumscribe the topic. From this point of view, if we have certainly done something to memes putting them temporarily in vitro, memes have also had an impact on our ways of thinking about and researching them,12 pushing us to adopt more flexible, hybrid and creative approaches. Such research establishes a relationship of “double turning-away or détournement (Deleuze, 1996) with its object and its practices: the research authors emerge themselves transformed. By obligating us to navigate between academic rigour and intuition, between formal analysis and immersion in cultural practices that are often difficult to grasp, memes become more than just simple objects of study, they become the co-authors of the research, catalysers of new ways of conceiving cultural dynamics in the digital age.

38Therefore, this work does not end with this issue; rather, a panoply of future prospects to explore the way in which our collective imaginaries shape and are shaped in turn by expressive and interactive forms is opened up. In definitive, memes remind us that an essential part of their force resides in their capacity to escape from all definitive capture, to always remain a step ahead, like those gnomes who use their wits to escape from the knights.

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 From end of June 2024, many videos were shared initially by Crawly (@crawl.possessed) on Tiktok and Instagram. For a more detailed history of Gnomes vs. Knights, see: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gnomes-vs-knights.

2 For the music score, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWi_wCtLW90.

3 Lore, an abbreviation of folklore, is the universe (in a wide sense) that a cultural object composes: it designates of course characters, but also locations and settings, as well as values the object instils.

4 Some accounts even created videos and highly complex sagas to explain how the battle played out. See for example the Instagram creations of @gossipgoblin: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9H-R2zIra1/?igsh=MXNmdXdpemhkaW91aw%3D%3D; and of @Wothius: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9Ca8sGiTzH/?igsh=YzRvNG1jeWtsbmIy (accessed 19/11/2024). The battle is also present on other platforms, such as Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GnomesVsKnights/.

5 See for example the video by KFC: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9Al7Ryi8jO/?igsh=MW8yaWRyb3JmeHl6OA%3D%3D; see also the video by Ryanair: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9Ig8XRhe7h/?igsh=cml3cHhweHdzaWYw (accessed 19/11/24).

6 This is the case, for example, in the following video in which a gnome and a knight disrupt business at a McDonald’s: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pFGgIt9vc24 (accessed 19/11/24).

7 Through their subversive practices, situationists sought to go beyond art by constructing practical situations (hijackings, diversions, etc.). These situations broke with ordinary daily life and were aimed at reclaiming such life (Debord, 2006).

8 This phrase is inspired by the title of Jack Goody’s 1977 book (1979 for the French edition) – The Domestication of the Savage Mind. We allude, for instance, to cases of memes being exhibited in art galleries (Bril, 2022).

9 The first issue of the L’internationale situationniste journal pointed out that “The concept of situationism, naturally, has been conceived by anti-situationists” (Debord, 2006, p. 358).

10 The November 2024 American elections in particular spring to mind. See: https://theconversation.com/memes-photojournalism-and-television-debates-3-images-that-defined-the-2024-us-election-242689.

11 The term architext originates from the semiotics of writing on screens and designates “standardised models which, within digital tools, guide expressive practices” (Saemmer, 2018). On this topic, see also (Jeanneret & Souchier, 1998).

12 We can also add that the study of memes implies a level of mental labor (Neghabat & Miesenberger, 2022) on the part of not such meme creators, but also researchers who study these objects, that are both funny and tiresome.

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Laurence Allard , Irene De Togni , Fabrizio Defilippi , Lucas Fritz , Adrien Péquignot  et Gabriele Stera, « Performativity, domestication and resistance in memes »Hybrid [En ligne], 13 | 2025, mis en ligne le 29 avril 2025, consulté le 23 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/5004 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13ut3

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Auteurs

Laurence Allard 

Laurence Allard (University of Lille/IRCAV-Paris 3) is a lecturer in communication sciences at University of Lille-Culture Department/IRCAV-Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is a sociologist of digital practices. Along with Delphine Gardey and Nathalie Magnan, she has edited and translated Donna Haraway in the anthology Manifeste Cyborg. Sciences-Fictions-Féminismes ,Exils, 2007. Latest publication: Écologies du smartphone [Smartphone Ecologies], Le Bord de l’Eau, 2021, co-edited with Alexandre Monnin and Nicolas Nova. 

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Irene De Togni 

Irene De Togni (University of Paris Nanterre/Dicen-IdF) is a PhD student in information and communication sciences. Her work focuses on participatory digital writing within the corpus of cultural criticism platforms, and notably on lists as a digital form of structuring and organising participation. She is also interested in relationships between gender and generation in digital writing. 

Fabrizio Defilippi 

Fabrizio Defilippi (University of Paris Nanterre/Dicen-IdF) is a PhD student in information and communication sciences and undertaking a thesis on the socio-technical imaginaries of the future. His work addresses the imaginaries of the Anthropocene and the discursive production of socio-technical scenarios in the French space. He is also interested in memes as vectors of shared social signification.

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Lucas Fritz 

Lucas Fritz (University of Paris Nanterre/Dicen-IdF/IRIS-EHESS) is a PhD student in information and communication sciences and sociology undertaking a thesis on “neurodiversity” and “neuronorms”: activism for neurological and psychic difference, and changes in communication norms and experience of “troubles” in an era of joint advances in the digital world and in neurosciences. He is interested in memes from the viewpoint of the accessibility of modes of information and communication (both digital and non-digital) and their paradoxes.

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Adrien Péquignot 

Adrien Péquignot (University Paris 8/EUR ArTeC/CEMTI) is a PhD student in information and communication sciences at University Paris 8. His work focuses on the transformation of relations induced by the digitalisation of certain social practices. 

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Gabriele Stera

Gabriele Stera (University Paris 8/EUR ArTeC/Fablitt) is a researcher and artist, active in France and Italy. He is currently a PhD student at the University Paris 8 where he is undertaking a literature thesis focused on the creative uses of audiovisual subtitling. His research focuses on the relations between text and image and on the creative use of utilitarian paratextual devices. 

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