“It was funny at first” exploring tensions in human-animal relations through internet memes with university students

Abstract

Because of their mostly upbeat everyday presence in most people’s lives globally, Internet memes have gained attention as tools in spreading information and enacting attitudinal change in the face of environmental troubles. The reappropriation of memes for classroom purposes is not straightforward, however. We focus our exploration of Internet memes in environmental education to questions of human-animal relations. The context is a higher education course on multispecies childhood studies. The question we pose is whether and how Internet memes can bring forth tensions in human-animal relations. First we review literature mapping what Internet memes are and how they relate to humour and laughter. Then we explore what memes (can) do by creating Internet memes with university students of education. And finally we turn to affect theory and suggest that the potential for environmental education that Internet memes hold, may lie in understanding and using them as feral pedagogical creatures.

Keywords:

• Internet memes
• laughter
• humour
• human-animal relations
• higher education

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the students who participated in the course as well as to our colleague Maria Saari, who taught the course with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Laughter and other “play vocalizations” have been found to be spread throughout the animals worlds (Alter and Wildgruber 2018)

2 The course took place during the covid-19 pandemic due to which all physical gatherings at the university were prohibited and courses were held through video conferencing platforms.

3 As quoted in the film “if Beale Street could talk” directed by Barry Jenkins from 2019

Additional information

Funding

This article was produced as a part of the research project CitiRats supported by the Academy of Finland under award number 333438.

Notes on contributors

Tuure Tammi

Tuure Tammi (PhD) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oulu and one of the core members in the research team AniMate. His work is situated in the intersections of childhood studies, education, human-animal studies and critical theory. Tammi’s recent writings have examined multispecies childhoods with a focus on care, touch and violence, and materiality in environmental education through thinking with molds. Currently, he is exploring the (im)possibilities of sound, speculative fiction and insect-thinking in finding pathways for non-anthropocentric education.

Pauliina Rautio

Pauliina Rautio (PhD) is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oulu and an Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of Helsinki. Her transdisciplinary research team AniMate includes scholars of education, ecology, and biology, collaborating with artists working on science fiction literature and biological arts. Rautio and her group produce in-depth theoretical-empirical studies exploring processes of becoming and being human with other animals, combining ecological citizen science with education, human-animal studies and the arts, and utilising post-qualitative and multispecies (non-anthropocentric) methodologies.