 So I'm going to start with some background and I can't give you all the history of the Middle East region in a talk that's this short, but I want to give like a brief framing at least to help introduce us to the things that are relevant to the talk. And then I'm going to talk about the memes that I analyzed for this paper, how I did that analysis. I'm currently also writing a guide on how to study memes. So it's really important for me to make my methods more transparent and let people know what my process was and how they can also do it themselves. And then I'm going to tie that analysis to memes as mapping tools and what this concept means what are what its implications might be. And after that we'll open it up for discussion. So please know that you will have time for questions. So an important question to start with is, what is a mean. There are many definitions out there I use the more shift man's definition I find that it's broad enough yet specific enough to work with. And the more shift man defines means as a group of digital items that share common characteristics of content. So the things that are in them what they look like their form, the way that they look. Think about like text does it have text does it not have text and stands, which could be defined as the feeling that they convey or the mood that's in them. And they're circulated with awareness of each other so they're sort of in conversation with each other they're a group. A meme cannot be just the one singular thing. And they're circulated imitated or transformed on the internet by many users. So so that process of imitation and transformation is necessary. And there are parts that are supposed to be kind of the same, but with transformation there, there's an editing process that goes there, you change the caption, you might copy some parts and edit other parts. And many users is left here, kind of vague on purpose, because you know a lot of us are in some like chat groups that have maybe three or four people, and memes start to circulate there. And many users could be a really small group of people, but we also all know memes that go viral and are shared by thousands or millions of people. So many users can be a lot of different numbers. One example is the distracted boyfriend meme, which some of you maybe have seen floating around the internet. I brought three examples here today. So as you can see, the content, the image is the same in all of them, it's imitated in all of them. The structure is limited is imitated in all of them. But part of the content is different. So in the one on the top left, me is distracted from work by literally anything else. In the one on the top right, me again, distracted by the groceries that I bought with a $30 pad tie that can be delivered to my door. I feel like we've all been there. And the one at the bottom, specifically dedicated to Heather. Maybe your cat is distracted by the very fancy castle that you've got for it that probably cost a lot of money by literally any cheap little bucks. Okay. And the memes that I focused on in this paper specifically are images, but I also wanted to stress before I dig into this that memes can also be videos. We've seen videos on maybe Tik Tok or videos like music videos like Gangnam style or even dances like the Harlem Shake. We've seen those turn into memes. Memes can also be a sentence, who here has said or heard somebody say, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. So that's an example of a meme that's simply a sentence. So they can take many different forms. And memes have been used across the world, both to reinforce and disrupt our relations. Indigenous activists in Australia, for example, use memes to bring together a movement against the erasure of Indigenous people and raise awareness about the ways that Australian colonialism has been enacted over time. In China, internet users deploy creative content, including wordplay, memes, parodies to express political dissent or criticism and participate in what's become sort of a community ritual. Within the Arabic speaking context, specifically, scholars have shown how memes can be used as tactical social actions, whereby the subaltern uses memes in their struggle towards justice. I also talked previously in an article in the International Journal of Communication about memes being part of a general cultural push, whereby youth use this type of creative online content to interfere in the direction of global cultural flows. The summarizations of the political and cultural impacts of internet memes inform my analysis of digital culture as an extension of offline culture, rather than seeing the internet as a separate space. In fact, power relations from the so-called offline can also be reproduced online. My frame means as digital culture artifacts that are created and circulated in a way that's deeply connected to the social ties and the cultural and political experiences in the everyday lives of the people who create them. It's especially the case in the context of Palestinians who have been living under prolonged colonial rule, war, continued civic unrest, etc., that this separation between online and offline becomes even more muffled. In this paper, I argue that memes can be conceptualized as mapping tools that chart out the connection between cultural, political, and spatial boundaries, and participate in a playful negotiation of these boundaries. I think this framework is particularly useful for investigating memes in circumstances where space, culture, and politics are under constant change in negotiation. So I give the example of Palestine here, but I think there are many contexts, all contexts maybe, where this type of framework could be useful. Palestinian meme makers specifically navigate the dynamics of living under settler colonialism, global capitalism, and marginalization at the local and global levels, as well as their own cultural concerns. People want to talk about Palestinian diversity, gender equality, and youth issues, maybe that have to do with generational differences being a student in a different town, popular culture that they're fans of. Although new media technology are built on the assumption of connection through disembodiment from space, space is actually central to their form and their content. Scholars on digital culture in Palestine problematize the assumption that new media technology will bring with them a democratizing promise. Palestinians have used new media technology to recast ideas of access to land and space through, for example, creating online tours of Al-Aqsa mosque or digitized oral history and archives. This views is important for Palestinians and other indigenous communities across the world, where colonial power enforces a disconnection from the land through an erasure of the history of indigenous cultures connection to that land. This limits access of indigenous people to certain places and segments the indigenous population. New media technology in this way become part of a larger matrix of power in which Palestine's borders are continually constrained, Israel's get expensive, and the European unions get fuzzy. I'm drawing here from Helga Tawil Suri's work on this specific triangle of power. Helga Tawil Suri writes, from the perspective of Palestine, a core contradiction arises as a backdrop against which to understand information communication technology infrastructures. The containment of Palestinians in narrowing and disconnected spaces occurs at the same time that high tech globalization is posited as the route to openness through which to overcome the fragmentation and containment. In other words, new spatialities and bordering mechanisms are created, while others are eradicated. By outlining the ways that borders are simultaneously expanded and controlled in the advent of new media technology, Tawil Suri demonstrates that, as she puts it, the technological is spatial, political, and the spatial political is also technological. This technological, spatial, political relationship, which is what I'm going to call it for short, is manifested online through vague platform policies, discriminatory artificial intelligence on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, for example. Amal Nazal, who I think I have here, wrote about this. Palestinian youth also use TikTok to connect with each other and promote their own culture, but a lot of times they get met with backlash in comment sections or even get their accounts removed from the platform. So the experience of Palestinians on social media platforms tends to be sort of a mixed one, where they're able to form community and celebrate their culture and do creative things on one hand, but at the same time they receive much backlash either by the state, by online trolls or platforms themselves. And what I wanted to see is where do memes fit in this technological, spatial, political relationship? What are they doing for people who make and share them? And what do they do in the space specifically of mixed cities? So to answer this question, I focused on three Instagram pages, two meme pages from mixed cities that are situated in the north of Israel, Haifa memes and Nazareth memes, and one more page that's dedicated to life on the inside that doesn't mean jail. The inside refers to the borders that were established by Israel in 1948, in case you're not familiar with the term. It's called Idahl in Arabic, and so that page's name is Mass on the inside, which is where I drew the title for the article. And all of these three pages have thousands of followers and post regularly, I kind of wanted to engage with meme accounts that are active and popular. And I chose the latest 50 relevant memes from each of these Instagram accounts to analyze by posts that weren't relevant were removed. So the way that I determined what's relevant is the posts had to be considered a meme. So if there is simply like a screenshot sometimes meme accounts will post like a screenshot from the news or something like that. And there was no process of imitation transformation, or something like that so that wasn't considered a meme. So I dropped it from the corpus. In addition, I also filtered out posts that focused only on topics that were not relevant to the spatial political relationship that I was looking at. So there were a lot of posts because of the timing of when I wrote this there are posts about COVID-19 that were just about like wearing your masks under your nose or over your nose so stuff like that that had nothing to do with the context outside of COVID-19 or mask wearing that didn't mention any specific group or culture or city or politician or something like that. I removed those posts, they were likely also copied from other accounts, but I had no way to determine that. But yeah, so if posts discussed COVID-19 but within the context of people's relationship to culture to the state to the city itself, then those I left in. And people often often ask me about this so I went ahead and shared this image here to explain that in my process here, I included the visual part so the image part of the meme. Or for those folks who are at home, you can see it on the right side of the screen. And I also included the caption at the bottom. The rationale behind this was that the text was often not edited onto the image. It's like it's much quicker if you screenshot an image and then instead of having a caption on the meme, you just use the caption below. So there were some memes that were image only and the caption below had to be included because I didn't want to miss out on any commentary or a lot of times that's where the butt of the joke was. And for my analysis, I based it on criteria that came up from the memes themselves as well as from the academic literature on digital media and space in Palestine, some of which I mentioned earlier. And the criteria noted things like places like towns, neighborhoods, cities, countries, cultures and subcultures that were named in the memes. Politicians, celebrities, any figures that appear or are mentioned in the meme languages that were included and other keywords that helped me identify recurring themes. And so I have two notes kind of here very briefly related to the analysis that I understand space as kind of socially negotiated and socially constructed space boundary masses work and memes as a geographical concept, which can be used as a tool that's suited for the analysis of popular culture discourses that transform social practices in spite of their apparent superficiality and triviality. So here, David Johnson is talking about memes in general, not specifically internet memes, but I use this concept to kind of connect it to how space is socially negotiated and memes can be part of that negotiation. I organize the data based on three themes which we're about to go into, but I'm going to give like a brief kind of overview to for you all to see the meta picture of these three levels. The themes aren't always mutually exclusive so I kind of organize the data but they can also be there means you will see that might belong in more than one. And first we have the global level that reflects how they navigate and intervene in global political dynamics and seeing that the timing of this analysis so when I was writing this it was like December, January, February, and then like I did revisions later but the article is already written and the data was already collected. And because that coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, and there are certain like big global events such as the US Brokered Agreement between Israel the UAE and Bahrain. It's not surprising that there were a lot of means that commented on sort of these things that were happening around them. The second level is a state level where I examine means framing of issues that involve local institutional politics. So with the Israeli state, the Knesset, then there was also like ongoing elections or the series of like three or four elections in a row that were happening at the time that I was collecting the data. The third level was that was angered Palestinian diversity. So this level looked at the ways that Palestinian diversity was reflected through the means, both in terms of how means as a group portrayed a diverse group of people, but beyond representation it was also about what intentional steps people took to emphasize that cultural diversity and invite people from different places people with different dialects to join in on the main conversation. And this is the part where we're going to dig in and the part where we're going to see a lot of means. So if you're here for that, this section is for you. Okay, so we started navigating global dynamics in many means reference US politics and popular culture. Sometimes these things also intersect, right? So this reflects the dominance basically of the US on the global cultural stage. It's not surprising since US institutional politics directly impact the politics in Palestine, Israel and the larger region. And the way that this came up is that many means use images of US politicians in funny like mashup content or for the purpose of just participating in a certain trend. So the Bernie meme went viral after the original image was taken during the inauguration of Joe Biden as president. And here we see Bernie wearing his mittens we can barely see the mittens because they've been replaced by the Palestinian coffee. And this meme was accompanied by a caption in Arabic it was side club, which means like it's super cold literally means it's called as dogs but that's it just means it's really cold. Other means also expressed lack of confidence in US politicians, both in their impact in our own country so here, and in the possibility of them having halting the empowerment of oppression locally. President Donald Trump was a common figure in these means, which is also not surprising like I think we've seen less Trump means and less Trump tweets. Since the election they kind of tone down but at the time that I was doing this work, they were still circulating and Trump was still tweeting I believe. So this meme for example on the left. It says, it's like a fake tweet, it fabricates a tweet so this isn't a real tweet that Donald Trump shared. And it says you can take all the status and all the profits just let me have the homeland, and the caption then said, I am a citizen. But this, you know, is sarcastic, because it is the exact opposite of what he practiced during his time in office. On the right uses Trump's tweet stop the count to kind of make fun of what happens on the night out when you see the waiter calculating your bill. And I think this was specifically about downtown Haifa. And the normalization of Israel's relationship with Bahrain and the UAE was another global political issue that came up in the memes. Memes created parodical scenes mocking their relationship and emphasizing their lack of access to enjoy the perks that it might provide certain people. The text in these in a lot of these teams and captions repeated that they meaning the mean makers or mean circulators can't afford a trip to Dubai themselves and they also made fun of Haifa's so called rocket. Which looks a lot like Dubai's Burj Al Arab, which is a really famous hotel in Dubai. I have a picture coming up next. So here we have to move this for folks who are in the room. So we've got people making fun of they're making fun of themselves to read there's like a comment on class status here and on money. You can't afford to travel to Dubai. You can take Haifa's light rail and go to downtown where you can see the Ministry of Interior that has this building that really resembles Dubai's Dubai's Burj Al Arab. And this image is of an Emirati person. When they come to Haifa and they see this building, they're really mad. And this is kind of again mocking kind of a class difference and who has money who doesn't have money. So it says when you start a night in downtown Haifa and finish it in Dubai. And for those who aren't familiar. So this is Haifa and this is Dubai. So the buildings do look a lot alike. And this has been like an ongoing kind of mockery thing since the building was built in the early 2000s, I believe. An important thing to notice about the dominance of US culture and meme culture is that what it does, it makes it so that participating in meme culture necessitates a level of fluency in US popular culture. And this necessity for fluency in US culture is exemplified in the use of trending memes. So we saw the Bernie meme, Donald Trump stuff. But also there are a lot of memes that use movies and television shows. So people need to kind of be acquainted with whatever is trending in the US meme culture, but also in US popular culture and politics in general. So there are a lot of memes that use like the office. I don't know, I can think of like the Spider-Man meme where he's pointing. There are a lot of Game of Thrones memes, etc. On the other hand, though, despite US culture kind of having that dominant status, it's also notable that many memes makes languages and cultures. And although US cultural fluency is a prerequisite for participating in meme culture, mixing English into Arabic wasn't really encouraged. In fact, the memes kind of drew a hierarchy of languages that intersected with class and gendered connotations. So colloquial Palestinian Arabic dialect was put kind of as the preferred choice as the meme speakers class choice. And Fus Ha, also known as modern standard Arabic, was portrayed as the hipster choice or the overly intellectual kind of snappy choice. If anyone in this room speaks or is learning Arabic, just FYI, this is what the meme makers say, it's not me. Mixing English was portrayed in the memes as being either classist or trying to associate with a higher class. So whether you're making it or not. It was also portrayed as less masculine, and so was mixing Hebrew. Mixing Hebrew was mocked as an attempt to overcompensate or sometimes was associated with fragile masculinity or kind of trying too hard. Ultimately, Palestinian makers use of global political and cultural content in memes reflects kind of their positionality, the place where they stand. While it's also a way for them to intervene in that reality and rethink that hierarchy and place themselves within it. They reassign meanings to the cultures and politics that they are consuming but also creating. It's a way to understand or make sense of the space around them and the cultures around them, but also to move between these cultures and these spaces. So the lack of confidence in politicians that I mentioned at the global level extended itself also to Israeli state politics, including Palestinian members of the Knesset as well. When it came to Israeli political figures like former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was still Prime Minister at the time that I was doing this work, memes pointed to a type of hypocrisy, whereby politicians in general reach out to Palestinians for votes, but without taking any actions to improve the situation of Palestinians living in Israeli cities or towns or neighborhoods on the ground. The memes express the deficiency in resources and infrastructure that impact the Palestinian community. This meme addresses it in Haifa specifically, citing the different treatment and resources that Palestinians in neighborhoods like Abbas and Wadi Nisnas get from the municipality. These are predominantly Palestinian neighborhoods. At the very bottom of this window is a historically Palestinian neighborhood. And on the other side of that, we have neighborhoods like the Kermal, a predominantly Jewish Israeli neighborhood that are getting sort of the better treatment of the Haifa municipality. And again, I want to remind everyone that when I was writing this, just to give some context, the state of Israel was headed towards this fourth election in two years. Then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had won the past three elections, but only by a margin and nearly failed to create a government coalition between different parties. And much of this process is kind of reflected in the memes. There are memes like about voting, about elections, about campaigning, a series of memes pointed directly towards Netanyahu's efforts. They talk about Netanyahu, how he intends to milk Arabs and play games with people and attempt to lure some Palestinians into voting for him or to trick them into voting for him. So we have this meme on the left here. We see an image of Netanyahu. I think you can see more clearly like on the Instagram account itself, for some reason the screenshot didn't capture that very well. But he's playing soccer on the beach and it says, I'm going to play ball with you or like I'm going to use you to play ball. And on the right here, we have a game of chess where I think the key piece here is Salama Alaikum, like a mispronunciation of Salama Alaikum. I think there was a speech that Netanyahu gave where he tried to say hello in Arabic, but it was mispronounced. And so meme makers are kind of mocking that effort that like, oh, with a single misspelled word, you think that you're going to trick people into voting for you. And that's not it. Memes also expressed a lack of confidence in Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset. Many of them of those members were portrayed in a mocking or a parodic way. This was especially the case for the Joint List, Al-Qa'im al-Mustarakah, an alliance that was formed in 2015 between parties that have a Palestinian majority in the Knesset. It's sort of a strategy that maybe if we create a Joint List that has all of these four Palestinian majority parties, maybe they will get kind of a better seating in the Knesset. So memes were used to criticize certain Knesset members to point to their inauthenticity and hypocrisy. The example here shows Mansour Abbas, a common figure in the memes, Mansour Abbas was named Allah. There were like a few folks who were named Allah. This guy, Mansour Abbas, separated from the Muslim party, his Muslim party from the Joint List that was created in 2015. And he's portrayed a lot in memes as someone who's willing to go to extreme lengths just to gain political power, even if that means betraying his own people's interests. And here Abbas is criticized for posing up to Netanyahu's family and doing whatever Netanyahu asks them to. So here we have Netanyahu, his wife Sarah, and their son Yair of the magic carpet. And some more context of like since I wrote this thing, Mansour Abbas split from the Joint List completely and he created a United Arab List that actually is only his party. And this party was instrumental to forming the Israeli Knesset Coalition in June of 2021. So he kind of stayed on brand and actually ended up helping form the current Israeli government coalition. Memes also raised issues concerning cultural erasure. So we already saw kind of this meme through the spoiler alert earlier. They commented on the practice in which Zionists appropriate foods like hummus and falafel. And the one here kind of reflects this long standing tension that rises from claims of hummus and falafel as Israeli food using an image from the January 6th insurrection in the US capital. And this brings me to the third section, navigating the Palestinian experience and cultural diversity. So memes also express the diversity of Palestinian culture and subcultures within that culture, as well as common experiences of Palestinian youth. And by youth I mean the people who are creating and circulating the memes. To guess their ages I would say it's maybe 16 to 30 something, like early 30s. A recurrent meme, for example, consisted of memes that were mainly concerned with the student experience, a college student experience. Many Palestinian students leave their hometowns or for universities in cities like Haifa, Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Or even to study abroad, Jordan is like a very common place for people to go study. Or Jeanine in the West Bank. And they return to their own hometowns on the weekends. And they refer to it as in Balad, which just means the town, but that's how we refer to our hometowns. And honestly a whole paper could be written about these like university versus Balad memes or the student experience memes. People commented on the difference between their town and their university town. They share experience like looking for apartments in a crowded and expensive city, living on a low budget, shopping online on a low budget, asking parents for money every week, or doing laundry at home, which I also did in college. And memes show how youth make sense of these different cultures that they are navigating and the cultures that exist in each one of the universities. So here we have an example on the right pointing out how people dress in Haifa University versus a kind of less formal dress that's common to the Technion. I went to the Hebrew University, I'd say it was more on the Technion side of things. And here we have Bernie Sanders. I think a lot of us saw this meme. It's from the Bernie Sanders campaign. And here you have kind of a university student going home and to ask their parents for money yet again. And memes also included captions that are calling on people from different places around Palestine, acknowledging not only the diversity of the followers of the specific meme account and the fan base of the meme account, but also the mobility of people within Palestine, how they move around Palestine. They write kind of shout outs to people from different cities or towns using their local dialect, inviting them to participate. So for example, I'll give an example of the town of Coferpanla. So like people would say like, hey, where are the people of Coferpanla? Tell us how you say this phrase or something like that. And the caveat I'll mention here is that not all memes are disrupting oppression and creating an inclusive environment. It's really a mixed bag. I definitely saw some memes. I would say that they're a minority, but they did exist that were sexist and homosobic. These types of memes kind of mocked women commenting on like makeup habits, how people pose for photos, and other kind of stereotyping portrayals. Some memes associated being gay with a lack of masculinity in a way that can reinforce toxic masculine and homosobic attitudes. And there were also kind of cultural rivalries that came across in the memes. So here we have the Haifa University versus Technion rivalry. There's Nazareth versus Haifa. Haifa's criminal neighborhood that we saw earlier versus downtown and kind of pointing to different comparisons. And these comparisons highlight what kind of I already alluded to a little bit before that these memes are both reflective and also function for navigating these spaces. So who gets to go where or how should you behave when you go somewhere? So in this meme, we see someone from Nazareth and if they go, how they behave in order to fit in if they go to Haifa. So this meme basically portrays the process of code switching by using these dog memes. So on the left side, we have a person from Nazareth when they're in Nazareth. So they're the swole dog, the larger, more muscular dog. And they're using heavy Nazarene slang saying things like, I'm telling you, I'll beat him up. And then when the person from Nazareth goes to Haifa, they become smaller, suddenly they're mixing English, using words like vibe and downtown. And again, portrayed perhaps as less toxic masculine and more trying to conform with the environment that's surrounding them. Memes as mapping tools then chart out the social stratification and indicate where the boundaries are drawn between different social groups and subgroups within the group of Palestinian youth. They tell us how people from these different subgroups might experience space when they move in it and who gets to go where in mixed space. In addition, they show us who holds power to decide regarding mobility and regarding resources and infrastructure. Mixing popular culture and current events means connect livid experience of culture to the discourse that's around it and create an intervention in it. I suggest memes as mapping tools that introduce their consumers to the lay of the land, culturally, politically and spatially speaking, and allow their producers to comment on and intervene in those spatial and political dynamics. Memes draw out not only the different spaces of neighborhood cities and the world, but also map out the social stratification related to these spatial politics. Answering questions like who can and can't navigate these spaces easily or smoothly? Who holds power in these spaces? Who decides where resources go? Or to present some more concrete examples based on the memes that we saw, who owns downtown Haifa on a Thursday night? Who is and isn't welcome in downtown? Which neighborhoods in Haifa are thriving? Which ones are drowning? How does a person from Nazareth need to act in Nazareth and how do they need to act in Haifa? Where do Palestinians stand on the chessboard or the soccer field of Israeli politics? Memes made by Palestinian youth in Israel map out the cultural and political terrain, showing where they stand on this map, their positionality in a complex web of cultural politics and political dynamics, and how they move within that cultural, political and spatial landscape. Their precarious citizen status, which I talk about a little bit more in the article if you're interested, is also reflected in the complex experience that's mapped out through the memes that they make, which demand deep knowledge of the space, the languages, the dialects, the culture and subculture, ways to behave and navigate the space smoothly, where to go for better resources or to find spaces with people who have similar values. The urban spaces of Haifa and Nazareth, just like the rest of the region, are continually changing and being contested. Both Haifa and Nazareth are rich in Palestinian history and cultural life. Although these cities are technically mixed, housing both Israeli Jewish population and the Palestinian population, the neighborhoods remain largely segregated. In the recent few years, Polly Withers writes about this. I can't remember if I put a quote. The recent few years in Haifa, notably, there has been a process where middle class youth are kind of refashioning urban spaces into enclaves that center Palestinians and their culture and where Israeli Jewish citizens are considered guests. And so memes are part of this larger process. The meme content from these mixed cities is in line with narratives that break what's been labeled the myth as coexistence. Diana Butu wrote in The New York Times recently about this myth that Palestinians and Israeli Jews in mixed cities are a model for coexistence. The memes that I looked at here draw a picture where Palestinians and Israeli Jews do not spend time together in the same spaces and do not receive the same rights or infrastructural resources. The memes in this corpus makes popular culture from different parts of the world. And some of them notably mixing cultures and languages becomes a way to celebrate or point inwards towards either problems or issues within Palestinian culture itself. Popular culture that's coming predominantly from the US then is oftentimes used or deployed as a means for navigating the local cultural landscape. And it's usually at this point that I asked what's at stake. So the conceptualization of memes as mapping tools acknowledges that memes are implicated in the relationship between the spatial, political and technological. I think it's this side. Bear with me. Almost done. Memes as mapping tools helps us draw the connection between digital culture to space and life in cities. The conceptualization of memes as cultural mapping tools also complicates the idea that new media technology is going to necessarily be a liberatory force or a democratizing force. This framework can show us how meme culture is simultaneously creating new possibilities for inclusion and celebration, while it can also reinforce existing systems of oppression, as we saw with the examples that reinforce sexism or homophobia. But new media has been and still is also leveraged to combat the segmentation that's enforced by settler colonialism. Memes as mapping tools can allow us to assess where that cultural segmentation stands at a certain moment in time and from a specific cultural perspective. What these memes accomplish here is carving out room for Palestinian youth within these cultural spaces that are difficult to navigate, or where they experience risks or limitations. Memes become part of that process that Polly Withers talks about of refashioning urban spaces into enclaves that center Palestinians and their culture. So they use digital culture vernacular as part of a larger cultural shift to make room for and maintain the connections across Palestinian culture. For example, by inviting participants with different accents and from different towns, meme makers push for recognition of Palestinian lived experience and hold space for their cultural diversity. The memes map out Palestinian youth aspirations for their cultural politics their desired values. The hard boundaries, when it comes to politicians, Israeli or Palestinian or global that are promoting settler colonialism and working against the interest. They point to a clear direction of which they think justice would look like having fun with cultural diversity, equitable distribution of rights resources, and a stop to colonial erasure and cultural appropriation. So final thoughts to close on a personal note, kind of. This is my first time writing about hypha. This is a city where I grew up. And I was writing about it as I mentioned during COVID-19 pandemic, where it didn't seem to be a prospect of visiting. There are a lot of memories that came up during that time, a lot of important political things that were going on. Those things can make the writing process very interesting. So I just kind of wanted to throw it out there because I recognize that I'm not the first and definitely not the only one who has a personal experience like that, and just wanted to make that process less invisible. And as I mentioned, this article has just been published in information communication and society. So please check it out. If for any reason you don't have access, shoot me an email. It's part of a special issue that they just published about means and politics. So if this is a topic that interests you in general, there are plenty of cool papers to check out. And kind of where this, to talk about where this work might go in the future. One is, I will continue to explore means that are made by Palestinians. I think this is a very important area to study. There's a lot of complexity there. It's not an area that's been explored. And a lot has happened. Again, since I wrote this December, January, it's kind of crazy to think how within, you know, the big formula that went on, I think started in April, May. Was that one or what's happening? And then June there was elections and things kind of continue to happen and change all the time. And so the means also change. There are new trends and new things to write about. So I do think about publishing a follow up article and your questions and ideas today might help carve out the direction that that might take. And for people who are thinking about means is mapping tools. I might also recommend kind of a more narrow focus, both for myself and for you. Since this paper was kind of the first one on Palestinian means, I went and explored the accounts, as is, and covered so many different things, and so many different small ideas here and there. And I think now that I'm reviewing it, I'm like, oh, each one of these can actually benefit from being focused on and being kind of a sole topic could be a paper on its own. So the message that I want to leave you with today is that means and digital culture in general are part of our space. They're in a relationship with our space, going back to that technological spatial political relationship. So how do we make sense of this relationship? I'd be interested to see, for example, what image of the world do means draw? How could they dictate where we go in the world? Or other ways that technology is used to reinforce and disrupt oppressive power dynamics on the ground. And again, I want to end by thanking everybody for listening. Thank you, Andrew. I think we made it through. And we'll open it up for Q&A now. But I'm going to put my email up here. I know we have some folks online as well. If you feel like reaching out, please be in touch. Thank you all. Welcome, Justin. We can just do this together. I think I can see me on multiple screens. That's so good. So we're going to take a few questions from the room while the people online should feel free to type their questions in the chat and Andrew will flag us when we have some good ones. I mean, that was terrific. Thank you so much. I have some big questions that we have in the room to start with. Hi. Nice to meet you. Interesting. I wonder how we can understand the effect of these, you know, or how, I mean, I know it's really hard to know the kinds of effects there are, but I wonder what we might point to are there some ways to say that I agree that political that certainly map cultural boundaries, gender, we see national state politics, global politics. I mean, I wonder though that given the kind of snarky attitudes, you know, that does that kind of undermine a little bit or, you know, I know snarky could be pretty political too. It doesn't necessarily make it not political but there's always a bit of a distancing that goes off with the snarker aspect of it. Oh, it's just a joke. You know, and so that's sort of the general question of, and I agree that there are political but, but I can also imagine the criticism that they're not back, or they can't really have that. Whatever it is that, you know, it's not, it's not real political action, you know, the old school. So that's the question. And part of it too is, do you talk to people who interpret me, you know, we didn't get a lot of voices of people who say, oh, you know, I saw this being that really did this for me or did that for me. And that might be a way of giving a little more meat on the bone for what kinds of reaction people have besides. And so, and I'm asking that as an anti-politician, we've come up with lots of ideas, we've come up with ten years and so five or six years to come back to this. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm wondering about that. Thank you. Well, first it's nice to meet you for, I think this is our first time meeting. Okay, the first part of your question was sort of about the effect of means. And I think it's, you know, this is the business of like, proving causality, right. And it's hard, like unless someone tells me like, I did this because I saw a meme, and this was the main reason, like, before that, I had no idea I was going to do it and then I did it. And this hasn't happened to me in an interview yet. So I cannot prove causality, but kind of the wider question of thinking about, are they political or are they not? I think this is also up for negotiation. Like I define politics very broadly. And for me, like participating in culture and being part of a cultural shift, you know, you're pushing, you might be not, you might not be pushing in like a super strong way, but sort of pushing a little bit. And I think that is political, especially that a lot of people might be navigating a very sensitive kind of area where either their own safety or their work or something might be at risk. So that very small push is also kind of political. But I know that's for some people, political is, you've got to be outside with a sign. And so, and some of those people are doing both, like I maybe not in this case specifically, I don't know. Like those memes, there was meme accounts specifically are anonymous, like I've not been able, despite being from Haifa, and it's like a small community, I haven't been able to crack who is doing Haifa memes. You guys find out, let me know. But I've done interviews for my dissertation and I agree it's interesting things come up. A lot of times it like maybe confirms what I'm thinking or gives me new ideas. Sometimes their ideas that like keep coming up that I'm like trying to push away and then I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to deal with this like a lot of people talk about means as their own language or universal language. So I started working on my dissertation kind of trying to steer clear from that like lingua franca metaphor, but people kept mentioning it so I like okay this is what people are saying and this is important. But I am, since those means me my town specifically were anonymous I kind of didn't want to, you know broach people's anonymity without their consent. Anyway, thank you. I'm really glad you mentioned that you grew up in Haifa since the time you were at it. I was going to ask about the personality. Yeah, thank you for that question. I think, well one is like my positionality in this case I think it really helps me understand and interpret, especially writing this while like not being able to be there physically at writing about space I think it's interesting. And in terms of bringing memes to a different context so in my work but context is really important. So I do a lot of contextualization and I'm writing. That was kind of one of my beliefs with review to in the process of writing this article is like, I'm giving as much contextualization as I can, especially in a region where things are changing constantly so I'm not trained as a person. So I'm not trained as a person. So I'm not trained as a person. So I'm not trained as a person. So I'm not trained as a person. So I'm not trained as a person. I'm writing this article is like, I'm giving as much contextualization as I can, especially in a region where things are changing constantly so I'm not trained as a historian at all I don't really have that skill that I was trying the best I can to capture like that's why I keep saying like it captures what is going on in the moment. And even though this is a meme that you can still go to the account and you can still see, and the timing of when it was posted and when it was shared is also important. And even now kind of the context that I was giving throughout that's not the article that since it was written also matters of like okay what ended up happening like what do we know now that we didn't know then. So, I understand that for someone who's not familiar with the context that can kind of be a little bit disconnected. But I think it's, you know, they're worth exploring because they also teach us about either other places other context other ways that means at least at the end of the day I'm not historian like at all. And my goal is to really look at digital media and to really understand it I think it takes stepping out of kind of the dominantly familiar things. So yeah, that's my take on it. You showed us in the memes was I mean some of these memes are I mean they're global. So they're universal, but you know the sort of like, I'm looking at the Bernie meme or yeah like the distracted boyfriend distracted boyfriend seems like particularly like all human beings get distracted by things, or even the sort of baby drowning returns in the old person under the sea. Yeah, but it seems like part of what happens in the beans is you take these things which should be universally recognizable, and then you add some kind of in joke to them that that that renders it somehow only possible to like a very small Yeah, what's the appeal, what's the appeal of taking something universal and making it like why not just make your own in jokes. What's the what's the draw you think kind of funny thing to take a universal thing make it only funny to, you know, what are called people. Yeah, I think you know like those memes actually like those accounts have a bigger following that some of the things that I explored for my dissertation so I think actually like looking at memes that are maybe not necessarily trying to go viral. Like I interviewed people who are like, I'm not really trying to have more following. I made this account because I was sending my friends memes on a chat group and they told me well why don't you make this account. And then slowly more people start following them. But again there's a limitation right especially with the culture mixing because if you're looking at a burning meme that is mixing Arabic for example and a lot of times it's spoken Arabic so it's specifically a Palestinian like that might be like understandable to people in like the Levant like broadly defined. But that's still like kind of a limited group of people and if you take in having to know the politics having to know the space the ones that are about like downtown and things like that like it keeps narrowing down the audience. But I think that is what sometimes tends to make it more funny for those who get it there's a certain amount of like pride I think that we get when we get the joke and we know that others might not get the joke. We feel smart I think you know I'm again I'm not a psychologist is just like out of instinct of thinking where it is. But in terms of political power I think that there is a power move in deciding who's included and excluded. Because when people are editing an image they're making decisions like this is not you know maybe they're not thinking about them taking days writing papers. But they are making decisions of like oh should I put English in here should I not like should I put this in a Nazareth accent or in a more like broadly understood accent so there are these are kind of decisions to include and exclude so to me like that is a power move. And I think you know, looking at that looking at high five means, along with kind of the cultural like urban like nightlife and the music scene that's been developing that is kind of trying to create this like separate safe most for Palestinian life, looking at these together is really interesting. Lower means are more important than what is happening on the top of the list. For me it's not even a question. The question I have today is because I'm just from the architecture perspective, look at the kinds of cases that I think that's a concept, but also the kinds of ways in which it works. So, I'm just asked with that, are you going to continue to tell us about that trend? Because I know in the world of architecture, it's something that it's kind of like open. Alright, it's your presentation, but no one's going to do anything, but I think by the end of the day, I'm hoping you might stick with it. And I hope I do plan to publish maybe within the next year to kind of a follow up article, continue to think about means as like creative digital media and their relationship to space. I feel like there's more there. And I think Palestine is like a great example for thinking about this because space is so contested and things are moving fast all the time. And even though like I will be, I do plan to draw like in the future more from architecture or urban planning or like the critical side from there because my work is interdisciplinary. So if you have recommendations, do let me know. So yeah, I think there will be more coming and if this topic is exciting for you, I'd love to hear more from your perspective as someone who knows architecture. Thank you so much. So there's a couple of questions about your insight and how we use this language. The first one is how do you write a conclusion of your research prior to that language? We thought it would be interesting. I'm just thinking about this one. And the second one is how do you use it in English if it means we raise your comments about the geopolitical aspect of it, right? How do you use it in English because I either use it in the political aspect or do you use it as a whole as a language? Yeah, thanks for that question. So to answer like the method thing is like a lot of times with because memes use like a caption that's in English. So if it remains in English and remains as is, to me that's like it's part of the meme. And so that's maybe where it falls into like cosmopolitanism and things like that where it's not like, oh, I'm going to use English for this one. But if you think like maybe as an opposite example of the meme that had like the guy from Nazareth when they go when they go to Haifa, and suddenly they're using English words deliberately. So then there were words like vibe like downtown like those are words that don't necessarily have to be in English, knowing again knowing the context I know that we don't usually say those in English in Haifa specifically. So there's an element there that you know a lot of it is like the message is like filling out like is this a common thing? Does this seem like is it an intentional thing? Is it part of the overall message? And a lot of what I like end up saying comes from recurring themes. So I gave like very few examples here, but the sample size was 150 memes, which would be my pleasure to just like go through all of them with you but we'll probably not make a very good presentation in the end. So if I see something that is constantly happening to me that's like a theme that is coming up. So let's take a question here. Yeah, so we're going to do maybe two. So early on in the presentation, maybe half of you. So the question that came in from a professor in Diego in the U.S. Amherst, asking why is there a disconnect between cultural popularity? Is this a disconnect from an example? I think I need a clarification is like the disconnect is coming through in this work specifically or like a disconnect. I'm not sure they're speaking or like speaking on the towards the context itself. Okay. So let's go to Carlton. Welcome to the neighborhood. Oh hi Carlton. A little bit more about the memes. Your memes show up there because the views are happy to post them, because we end up there because they're after they've already circulated to demonstrate some popularity. In other words, I'm seeing the most popular. Good question. So the memes that I focused on here specifically are the most recent 50 that are relevant. So there are a few here and there that were deemed not relevant as I explained before. Based on their either content or if they're not a meme, but I use the most recent 50 and those are definitely especially with the Nazareth memes account and the hyphen means account. I think that those are memes that were created by these Instagram users. The other account mess on the inside might have been using and removing certain trending memes, but they're mostly I would say, as original as I mean gets in terms of that they were created by these Instagram users. Hi. Thank you. Thank you for that wonderful. It's great. You can start from where other interests are. Yeah. Yeah. So I would say that there were more conversations happening about that on some of these meme accounts since kind of the events that began, began unfolding since March, with all the protests and, you know, the more that the content becomes political the more likely it will be censored by Instagram in some ways and then when it is censored we usually see like people who own the account, trying to speak up about it. This is not true for the accounts that I'm using here at this time but there are meme accounts that say in their profile description, here's my alt account. So they have already created an alt account by using maybe the same username and adding like a number or something like that. So they have like an alternative account in case this one shuts down that are like all of their fans are already following them on the other one. And regarding kind of the cross pollination between different platforms. So one of those pages also has a Facebook page and that posts the same things. So there isn't like for Palestinians I would say are not Palestinians that are situated in Palestine I would say are not using Twitter as much as Facebook and Instagram, especially as a source for memes. So I did kind of choose Instagram, despite having like a couple of these pages on Facebook, because it was where like things felt like they're happening, you know, that's where things are posted and shared and like where they have more followers, not as a measurement but like as part of the larger picture like where is there more activity happening. Yeah. I think I got a question. Thank you. Thank you. It was really great. I really appreciate that. Especially if you can follow these websites. And thinking about mapping of the memes themselves, I was curious, they really brought out how much memes are operating or kind of re mapping of relationality in different parties. I was curious, it seems like there's a few kind of recurring formal structure, really A versus B or any sort of B or triangle structure. Maybe get more complicated from there. Especially complicated. Yeah. There's a different context to these different structures. More complicated for the context and more complicated. Yeah. Now I'm thinking also of the meme of like the high sign for infrastructure meme where you see like the skeleton that's drowning at the bottom and then the baby swimming at the top, kind of the mother, helping one of the babies but not the other. So there is something to the structure. I think you're talking about like a visual structure as well as you know, that helps kind of deliver the message. The structures, I'll be honest, but I appreciate you asking this question because I think it's a great idea to look at kind of what the structures are doing to kind of deliver this message of relationality that I talked about because I think there's a bear there. Like, there were a lot of, you know, a versus be like we saw with the dog name with the Nazareth guy or like the way people dress in high five university versus the tech me on like there were some of these memes that were comparing I think that was definitely like a repeated format. But when it comes to the chess one and like the ones that are more complex. I just think that I would need to look back at the news and see if there is kind of a repeated pattern. Paul's question made me think about what Paul sort of proposes like, Oh, you did something really cool here that I could take all these other sites. But you're also work is also really local, in particular, in a place like all this sort of methods of using to examine these things. What do you feel like you would feel comfortable telling a bunch of graduate students like, Oh yeah, go and try this because it'll probably be useful in other places. And what feels like more particular to the examination, you know, of one city that you know really well. I mean, go and try it in other places. But always consider that the ethics of the work that you're doing, what you're bringing and taking from the space. And your positionality and mentioned in relation to the space. I am, I would be really curious to see people using kind of means as, you know, for to like how they map out the culture of Boston, MIT, like there are so many things that can be done and so I think the local examples are used. You know, like they're, they're useful for understanding high so that this really my goal is like to understand digital media better and understand how digital media can facilitate a certain relationship to the space or not. But yeah, I will say that knowing the context really well and providing context if you're writing providing context for your readers, considering that as part of your method and part of your ethics, I think it's really important. Yeah. Yeah, so we have a question from Professor. You're right. I still remember the truck talking on the border and actually through. I'm not sure if the visual jet position is hard to erase. I wonder about the power of these images just such positions, and you know the space to be as hard to capture essence at the moment. You can say a bit more about how means are unpacked. I mean means like how means are impacted as part of my method. I mean my answer to that would be like what we're just talking about which is context so understanding like when that name was born like where this image was taken. I think this is especially important with means that are pointing to a certain type of politics or political relationship because, you know, like if we go back to distracted boyfriend me more it's like me like you know getting distracted from work, like that is a universal and repeated kind of behavior that many people can recognize but if we are thinking about Trump at the border or that immediately made me think of the name was not in Yahoo playing soccer on the beach. So unpacking kind of the context of this was during election time. Here is the strategy that Netanyahu was known for. Here is what people who, you know, were writing maybe either like in the news or on social media like what the discourse was kind of around that event overall so context plays a huge role here. Let me see that and posted a response. Oh yeah that mixing English and Arabic is not really encouraged. Well, what I meant by that is, like in the example where we see the guy from the other phone. So mixing English in that way. And this is also I think it answers ends question of like it's not necessarily the adab easy example which is like mixing English and Arabic together as the same words or as the same grammar. But rather using English words as a way to relate to maybe a higher class or try to perform. So anything like it's that the authenticity is really important here so any hint of kind of a forced type of use that might indicate some sort of like in authenticity or trying to associate something that you're not really reading as you are is kind of this courage to say the least it's like mocked often. I mean you are part of that for that you know it will seem that you use it for nothing. If you if you are part of well this is where we need to go to the audience the analysis and do some interviews. I think the way that the main portrays it is mocking it. So I'm going to pretend that I was in a class that liked to mix unnecessary English words into my language that is not practiced among maybe like working class or lower class people. And I would say if I saw a meme that was mocking my behavior I probably might not like to read it, but that's just based on I guess. This makes me want to like take the same name and just like ask different people how they respond to it I think that would be great. I should just say thanks to Salafah for a terrific talk. I think I know you. The one a lot of the memes are like are divisive like it's awesome that and and the one don't we showed like a it was like acting on like the university. I can imagine like people on both sides of that sort of like interpreting that in different ways. It's like it could be divisive but it could also be one thing either perfect but I would like to look like the first on the right. But is there is there a sense that there's more that are sort of like being to divide that you're like allows them multiple entry points and quit that will allow people to take their perspective. I'd say like speaking about these accounts specifically or the means that I looked at very specifically. I, you know, I don't think that there are more means that are divisive. These could be read in a divisive way but I think for the most part it's like. It's true, like they really, you know, there really is that type of cultural difference. And the goal is really to make people laugh and participate rather than kind of be like, you shouldn't dress this way. This was especially true for two of the meme accounts and the third one is the one that sometimes have like homophobic or sexist type of portrayals. It's not very common but things like, oh, you know, like this is how girls like to take pictures, kind of mocking the way that like women that pose, or do their makeup or whatever. So, those I would probably label as like among maybe the more divisive group. Good. Well, thanks for terrific talks. Thanks everyone for a great conversation. Thanks Andrew for facilitating and thanks everybody online for joining us.