Doctoral memes as public pedagogy? Or, heaven knows I’m miserable now

Thomson, Pat

Abstract

Social media afford the proliferation of doctoral memes across numerous, generally anonymous, accounts spread over multiple platforms-the timeline where the PhD candidate starts off gleaming with health and beaming in delight and ends up an overweight, dishevelled wreck. Or the exhausted cat who has managed to write one line of their thesis in an entire day. But should these memes be a cause for concern? After all, it's just humour, albeit somewhat dark. My exploratory thematic analysis of a corpus of 292 doctoral memes and a theorisation of memes as public pedagogy, point to strong resonances between the memes and research on the doctoral experience. This enhances their credibility as a source of information. Based on the analysis, I suggest we might seriously examine doctoral meme-based learning, focusing on the potential of their gallows humour to support identity formation, community building, coping and wellbeing. Memes may be small but could potentially do useful work for both doctoral researchers and their supervisors.

Citation

Thomson, P. (2024). Doctoral memes as public pedagogy? Or, heaven knows I’m miserable now. Studies in Continuing Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2024.2417095

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 6, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Oct 18, 2024
• Publication Date: Oct 18, 2024
• Deposit Date: Oct 6, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 19, 2026
• Journal: Studies in Continuing Education
• Print ISSN: 0158-037X
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-126X
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2024.2417095
• Keywords: PhD; postgraduate; public pedagogy; memes; social media; humour
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/40441763
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0158037X.2024.2417095