Description
Refugee memes shape public imaginaries of displacement by using humour to transform complex experiences into condensed, accessible, and shareable digital forms. This project explores the politics of memes in relation to how these digital images, particularly (GIF) memes, shape public imaginaries of migration and belonging in Germany through spatial and temporal aesthetics. Drawing on Massumi’s (2015) notion of ontopower as the regulation of affectivities and Baspehlivan’s (2023) work on memescapes to turning to the affective designs of memes, the visual and invisual modes of circulation and centring their templated ways of othering as a key logic of networked feeling. It looks at datalogical forms of perception involved in their generation and the production of temporalities, situating memes within broader infrastructures of sensing and control in forced migration discourse. Focusing on gif-temporalities, the project foregrounds the looping affects of memes, their repetition, delay, and modulation, as modes of in-betweenness that produce dis- and reorientation. It analyses clusters tagged “#refugees,” “#Germany,” and “#Tagesschau,” to explore the affects that “stick” (Ahmed 2006) across Syrian and Ukrainian contexts to contribute to an understanding of how humour becomes recoded through visual repetition. By recognising the blurred line between memes and GIFs, the paper argues that these temporal images reconfigure resonance through looping aesthetics, making visible how digital humour and its affective infrastructures sustain the ontopolitical governance of emotion, visibility, and belonging.
