Memeifying academic work precarity

Community building of female early-career scholars on TikTok

Abstract

This paper explores how academic life became memeified on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic. For many academics, and especially early-career scholars, workloads increased during this time. Female academics, in particular, faced significant increases in household burdens. This paper focuses specifically on the uses of memes as humorous templates for expressing academic work precarity on TikTok (sometimes referred to as “Academic TikTok”), between the autumn of 2020 and the spring of 2021. Using digital ethnography, this paper attempts to understand how the precarity of academic work was expressed on TikTok, and how social media can be used for community building among early career scholars, especially during the pandemic. The analysis draws on content by 20 TikTok users working in academic institutions, including myself, as a content creator within this community.