Fear needs dealing with. Fear demands to be abated, countered or turned into something else, contributing and curtailing how we ‘do’ being human beings. This special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies addresses fear within media and popular culture, adopting a cultural studies approach …

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app. Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of the growing social media …

Internet memes are rewarded with popularity for their repetition of recognizable ideas. Likewise, meme communities tend to adopt a politics that is conservative - especially when the source material readily lends itself to that very politics. In the case of Star Wars, a tale of heroism is being twisted …

(This is part III of a series of essays on meme theory, all published on this site. Part I is called They Say That We Can’t Meme: Politics of Idea Compression. Part II is entitled Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images)

(This is part I of a series of essays on meme theory. Part II is entitled Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images). Part III is called Memes and the Reactionary Totemism of the Theft of Joy)

Writer and researcher Florian Cramer shares some of his research into little known factors influencing the rise of the alt-right - a segment of right-wing ideologies presented as an alternative to mainstream conservatism in the US. His presentation maps the emergence of this large white supremacist subculture, …