Short Abstract

Taking humor as both an aesthetic practice and a mode of social knowledge, this panel examines how African creators and audiences use short-form digital media to represent, negotiate, and contest changing relations of gender, class, generation, intimacy, morality, citizenship, and belonging.

Long Abstract

Short-form digital humor refracts contemporary African life through multiple, sometimes contradictory, lenses. In keeping with the theme “African Prisms,” this panel treats digital humour as both a cultural form and an analytical prism for interrogating representation, identity, infrastructure, labour, and knowledge production. Skits, sketches, memes, satirical videos, podcasts, and other short, comic forms translate everyday tensions into circulating performances, while digital platforms shape their visibility, repeatability, value, and reach. Taking humor as both an aesthetic practice and a mode of social knowledge, this panel examines how African creators and audiences use short-form digital media to represent, negotiate, and contest changing relations of gender, class, generation, intimacy, morality, citizenship, and belonging. Additionally, the panel asks what happens when African comic practices become platformed: algorithmically organised, monetized, transnationally circulated, and continuously remade through audience participation. Comparative work across languages, regions, platforms and media forms is especially welcome, alongside methodological reflections on researching ephemeral and rapidly circulating digital objects.

We invite papers that address, but are not limited to, the following:

Digital skits, memes, satire, podcasts, and other short-form videos

Audiovisual stylistic analysis, performance, and storytelling

Cultural identity, representation, community, and belonging

Algorithms, platform capitalism, moderation, datafication, and digital visibility

Monetization, advertising, influencer culture, and creator economies

Creative labour, authorship, and creator–audience relations

Political humour, civic commentary, and digital publics

Comparative studies across regions, languages, platforms, and genres

Multilingualism, translation, and transnational circulation

Connections between digital humour and oral, theatrical, cinematic, and vernacular creativity

Digital ethnography, audiovisual analysis, computational methods, and archiving

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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