Making sense of memes: how to study distributed knowledge as lay economics

Internet memes are increasingly recognized as part of political discourse, yet there is no consensus on how to study them. Much existing scholarship has focused on impact – debating whether memes function as resistance for marginalized groups or as vehicles for disinformation that reify the status quo. This paper shifts the question from what memes do to what memes know, re-conceptualizing them as sites of distributed, non‑elite knowledge production and dissemination. Using a set of macroeconomic memes as a case, the paper demonstrates that memes provide access to lay reasoning about political and economic conditions – access that eludes approaches centered on elite ideas or on meso‑ and micro‑level practices, creating a bridge between constructivist ideas and everyday IPE. The paper also introduces a methodology, based in Natural Language Processing, for studying memes as an archive of lay knowledge. This approach is more systematic than search-based approaches and offers a new template for integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis of large text corpora.