Memes, Magic and What It All Means: On Explaining Current Research When Your Findings Leave You Lost for Words

Abstract

I’m not sure I ever got describing my subject down to a tee during my first year of study. I began my research in 2014, having developed an idea for a thesis whilst in employment. Being from a practical background in art and design rather than a theoretical or academic one, joining Birkbeck to pursue a PhD was something of a sea change. Duly, I encountered the same challenges many would-be-scholars face when adopting the specific, oftentimes novel, sometimes combative-sounding, language of academia: that which reveals worlds within worlds. As a nervous newcomer, I sometimes felt that I was pantomiming this unfamiliar, inevitably loaded phraseology. Worse still, my research topic, internet memes, was not at that time as widely discussed as it is today. As a result, I was occasionally seized by apprehension when asked what I was researching. But neither my new college peers nor my uncle Jim would be well served by the answer I stumped up: ‘pictures of cats on the internet!’