Discursive ethnographic meme analysis: balancing etic and emic perspectives in meme studies

Meme studies have exhibited a marked tendency for methodological stability, prioritizing discursive-analytic approaches in their analysis. While this methodological consistency has advanced important insights, it has also left some aspects comparatively underexplored, particularly audience reception/decoding of memes, and emic, insider perspectives in the analysis of memes. This article introduces Discursive-Ethnographic Meme Analysis (DEMA), a methodological framework that integrates digital ethnography with discourse analysis. Harnessing the interpretive depth of ethnographic inquiry with the analytical rigor of discourse analysis, DEMA enables a more holistic analysis of memes, capturing both their socio-political significance as discursive texts and the ways audiences decode them. Using examples from research on Ireland Simpsons Fans, an image-macro meme group on Facebook, this article offers guidance for the application of DEMA, highlighting its ability to integrate etic and emic perspectives in meme analysis, and its potential to generate richer, audience-oriented insights that remain underexplored in existing research.