Sarah Trottier is an external PhD researcher in Gender Studies and Critical Theory at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University. Sarah’s research investigates how playfulness and ‘game-logic’ in digital cultural phenomena and online social media trends can operate as technologies of control and contribute to the proliferation of dehumanizing alt-right ideologies. This current project, “’Ludomemetics’: Playful Memes and Powers of the ‘Real’ in Post-Postmodern Alterreality,” foregrounds how structures, systems, and ideologies of colonialism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism can be covertly intensified and accelerated through memetic cultural discourse. This project is supervised by prof. dr. Rosemarie Buikema, dr. Layal Ftouni, and dr. Ingrid Hoofd. Sarah holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto (2015), and a Research Master of Arts (Cum Laude) in Gender Studies from Utrecht University (2020). Recently, Sarah was awarded the Hélène Phoa Gender Studies Research Thesis Prize for the RMA thesis “The Colonial Poetics of TikTok: Talking Dogs, Queer-Coded Cottages, and Getting to Know YourSelf through the Algorithm,” an ‘autonetnographic’ analysis of memetic culture contextualized within the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
