General Events

Dr. Cristina Moreno-Almeida is Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture at Queen Mary University of London. Her research explores digital culture, aesthetics, and politics, with a focus on online cultural production and far-right communities. She leads the ERC-UKRI project Digital Al-Andalus and is the author of Rap Beyond Resistance: Staging Power in Contemporary Morocco (Palgrave, 2017) and Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque (OUP, 2024), a study on how memes, horror, and the grotesque capture feelings of alienation and despair while also opening new opportunities for creativity in the postdigital era. She is also co-editor of the book series Global Digital Futures at University of Exeter Press.

Dis-meme-bering the Nation: Memes, Monstrosity, and the Distortion of Nationalist Fantasies
While digital tools promise enhancement and refinement, memes thrive on purposefully distorting aesthetic expectations. Drawing on my book Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque, this talk theorises memes through the politics of monstrosity and the grotesque, showing how digital infrastructures privilege rapid, affective forms of expression that operate as a language of the unspeakable. Within these new infrastructures, memes occupy the liminal space between humour and horror, wielding a distinctive capacity to expose, distort, and dismantle national and postcolonial narratives through a process I term dis-meme-berment. Dis-meme-berment describes how memes fragment and reshape entrenched symbols and narratives, mocking and deconstructing them while also reinforcing reactionary ideologies. Emerging as digital monsters that refuse to die, memes unsettle nationalist and political imaginaries. 

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