I work as a PhD researcher in applied linguistics at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the Ģֱ. From January 2024, I will be working on my doctoral thesis full-time, funded by the Kone Foundation. I have previously worked as an educational coordinator at JyU education services and as a designer at the Centre for Applied Language Studies.
Theme: “My depressed ass laughing at memes:” multimodal analysis on representation of mental health and illness in internet memes
Supervisors: Samu Kytölä, Saara Jäntti & Saara Särmä
In my dissertation, I examine mental health and mental illness themed humorous internet images better known as memes; their peculiar intertextual humour, their representation of mental health and illness, and their connections to the wider discourses surrounding mental health. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, memes that reflect psycho-social struggles, while still being laughable and cartoonish, become more popular every day. Memes are an essential part of internet culture and a means of communicating ideas and ideologies. Therefore, studying these memes can reveal important aspects of mental health discourses today; how these everyday cultural items use different resources to create humour on such a dark topic, and how the memes participate on wider cultural and societal issue of mental health and illness.My method is multimodal critical discourse analysis.