Creativity and Humor in Dark Times
Prof. Sulafa Zidani will present on her work searching the global internet for ways in which people use memes and other forms of online humor as a source of joy and a tool to process local and international crises in everyday life.
As a scholar of digital culture, Sulafa Zidani writes on global creative practices in online civic engagement across geopolitical contexts and languages such as Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. Zidani is currently working on a book-length study called “Global Meme Elites: How Meme Creators Navigate Transnational Politics on the Multilingual Internet.” She has also published on online culture mixing, Arab and Chinese media politics, and critical transnational pedagogy in venues such as: Social Media + Society; Asian Communication Research; Media, Culture & Society; International Journal of Communication, and others. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, “The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Resistance Online.” Outside of the academy, Zidani is an accomplished public educator. As a facilitator for the Seachange Collective, she has led workshops on antiracism and social justice for organizations such as NowThis, Gimlet Media, The Onion, and The Writers Guild of America. Her public writing on popular culture and politics has appeared in Arabic and Anglophone publications.
This event is open to current Georgetown University students, faculty, and staff.