In this study we look at how pro- and anti-vaccination groups construct alternative knowledge and facts
discursively and linguistically in order to challenge or support the established scientific knowledge on vaccines. Through this
case study we wish to examine how the power of language interacts with a language of power when memes in creative ways mimic,
produce and reproduce scientific language and practices. Drawing on a dialogical-semiotic and a discourse theoretical analytical
strategy, we, first, adopt Austin’s speech act theory and Bakhtin’s concept of speech genres to argue that memes are performative
with an especially illocutionary force and are made up of alien language from scientific discourses. Second, we argue that
Laclau’s discursive approach to how political positions are articulated in an antagonistic terrain allows us to see vaccination
memes as either subversive or supportive of a scientific social imaginary.
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Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Fritz, Alice Marianne & Andrea M. Smith
2025. Poison, lies, war: A mixed methods content analysis of posts about COVID-19 vaccination on Gab Social. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics 21:1
Tidy, Helen, Joanne Irving-Walton, Gary Currie, Leisa Nichols-Drew & Helen Page
2024. What do you meme? – Meme-Making as a research method. Teaching in Higher Education 29:7 ► pp. 1897 ff.
Klinge, Denise & Christina Müller
2023. Memes als Umgang mit der Corona-Pandemie – Aneignung und Auflehnung in Zeiten eines gesellschaftlichen Ausnahmezustandes. In Pädagogik des gesellschaftlichen Ausnahmezustandes, ► pp. 317 ff.
Yoon, Sunny
2023. The memefication of Squid Game and mimicry of Asian images. International Journal of Cultural Studies 26:5 ► pp. 497 ff.
Hultin Morger, Fabia
2022. Populism in Internet Memes. An Investigation with Analytical Approaches from Discourse Analysis and Multimodality. tekst i dyskurs - text und diskurs :16 (2022) ► pp. 277 ff.
Roslyng, Mette Marie
2022. Between Populism and Popular Citizenship in Science Conflicts. In Populism and Science in Europe, ► pp. 207 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.