About the lecture

Cute pet and animal images are staples of contemporary digital cultures, but the cultural tenets that inform their creation and circulation can often be wielded for more insidious means. The same social media that give us Grumpy Cat can also give us political hate symbols. By specifically interrogating the role of attention in relation to pet and animal social media, communication scholar Dr. Jessica Maddox will discuss the slippages between the cute and ugly of the contemporary internet. 
 

About the speaker

Jessica Maddox is an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama and co-director of the Office of Politics, Communication and Media. Her research interrogates social media, popular culture, and feminist media studies and has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, Television & New Media, and Information, Communication, & Society. She is the author of The Internet is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape our Digital Lives (Rutgers University Press, 2023).