Humour, academic labour, and researcher identity: A multimodal discourse analysis of PhD memes on Instagram

Social media has become an important space where doctoral researchers share, interpret, and negotiate academic experiences beyond formal institutional settings. Among these, internet memes provide a multimodal, humour-based means of representing academic writing, publishing, supervision, and researcher identity. This study examines how Instagram PhD memes represent academic labour and researcher identity and how audience comments take up and negotiate these representations. Drawing on a corpus of 188 Instagram memes and 350 audience comments from @phddiarymemes, the study employs Multimodal Discourse Analysis informed by Academic Literacies to examine linguistic, visual, and compositional meaning-making in the memes, alongside reflexive thematic analysis of audience comments. The findings show that memes represent doctoral writing and publishing as forms of academic labour characterised by revision, uncertainty, waiting, and institutional evaluation, while researcher identities are negotiated through self-deprecating humour, exhaustion, and emerging concerns surrounding generative artificial intelligence. Audience comments further demonstrate how humour facilitates recognition of shared experiences, experience-sharing, and identity positioning, contributing to digitally mediated forms of community meaning-making. The study contributes to Academic Literacies, multimodal discourse research, and humour research by demonstrating how humour functions as a discourse resource through which doctoral researchers represent academic labour, negotiate researcher identity, and collectively interpret academic participation in digitally mediated spaces.