Rosalynd Southern – författare

Women Politicians Online examines the complex relationship between gender, politics and digital media, focusing on how women politicians both navigate and are shaped by online platforms.Taking a mixed methods approach, the book examines the disproportionate hostility women politicians face online, strategies for curating their political image and the influence of satire and digital news on public perceptions. It forwards a novel framework for understanding how women politicians are depicted on and treated via digital media, while balancing this against women politicians’ use of digital tools to project authenticity, challenge gendered expectations, and reclaim political communication from traditionally masculine norms.

“This landmark book is the first to fully explain how memes have become a critical part of UK politics. Through rich and convincing empirical analysis, Southern reveals how digital humour is transforming citizen participation, elite communication, and the very nature of political discourse. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the evolution of digital political culture and its profound impact on democracy.” –     James Dennis, Researcher at Lusófona University, Portugal  “From ‘shitposts’ to ‘Karen memes’, political communication is changing and Rosalynd Southern is a lively guide to the pithy world of memes.  A cutting-edge study that deserves to be read. — Stephen Coleman, Emeritus Professor of Political Communication, University of Leeds, UK In 2015, a story emerged alleging that then-Prime Minister David Cameron had placed ‘a private part of his anatomy’ into the mouth of a dead pig’s head during an initiation ceremony at the University of Oxford. Upon this allegation breaking, social media erupted with a plethora of memes and jokes about the incident, which became known as ‘Piggate’. Although there had been a move towards jovial talk of politics on social media prior to this, the episode seemed to distil the practice and precipitate a new era of near-constant humorous online reaction to political events. Considering this context, this book assesses how memetic practices have shaped political communication and culture in the past decade-plus, and the consequences thereof. It does so from four perspectives, encompassing a focus on ordinary citizens, a group of online activists, a key social media satirist and, finally, focusing on how elites have deployed these practices.