The days where memes were plain image macros (an image that consists out of an imagecombined with text) are long behind us. New meme formats, some more obscure than others,are popping up like weeds. Memetic logics are also moving beyond the image into ‘the realworld’ (whatever that may be), but that’s a story for another time.In January 2022, when I was a participant in the Digital Methods Winter School of theUniversity of Amsterdam, my teammates and I came to an interesting conclusion. Inspired bythe forthcoming paper by Richard Rogers and Giulia Giorgi, called ‘What is a Meme TechnicallySpeaking’, we analyzed various meme collections taken from different software environments.1After a close reading of the dominant types of images, their ontology and epistemology, one ofthe most interesting findings, at least for me, was that our meme datasets were full of tweetscreenshots – which felt rather counterintuitive at first. However, once I started thinking aboutit, I realized that I have been noticing meme admins posting tweet screenshots on their pagesfor months now. One of my meme muses even told me that she did not know what her memepage has become, seeing all the tweets and other content she has been sharing lately. It hadme wondering. When leaving the technical and data driven context aside for a minute, has thetweet in its screenshot form become a viral image? Has the tweet become an actualmeme?
Project objectives Radicalisation research leads to ethical and legal questions and issues. These issues need to be addressed in way that helps the project progress in ethically and legally acceptable manner. Description of Work The legal analysis in SAFIRE addressed questions such as which behavior associated with radicalisation is criminal behaviour. The ethical issues were addressed throughout the project in close cooperation between the ethicists and the researchers using a method called ethical parallel research. Results A legal analysis was made about criminal law and radicalisation. During the project lively discussions were held in the research team about ethical issues. An ethical justification for interventions in radicalisation processes has been written. With regard to research ethics: An indirect informed consent procedure for interviews with (former) radicals has been designed. Practical guidelines to prevent obtaining information that could lead to indirect identification of respondents were developed.
This study shows how learner initiatives are taken during classroom discussions where the teacher seeks to make room for subjectification. Using Conversation Analysis, subjectification can be observed when students take the freedom to express themselves as subjects through learner initiatives. Drawing on data from classroom discussions in language and literature lessons in the mother tongue, the authors find that learner initiatives can be observed in three different ways: agreement, request for information, counter-response. A learner initiative in the form of an agreement appears to function mostly as a continuer and prompts the previous speaker to reclaim the turn, while the I-R-F structure remains visible. In contrast, making a request for information or giving a counter-response ensures mostly a breakthrough of the I-R-F-structure and leads to a dialogical participation framework in which multiple students participate. Findings illustrate that by making a request for information or giving a counter-response, students not only act as an independent individual, but also encourage his peers to do so.
