Top
Social Justice
Memes

Our annual Top Social Justice Memes considers memes used or created by our movements to challenge the status quo and shape politics and pop culture. This year, democracy — the ideal, the vision, the value — is the thing we are concerned with.

Our annual Top Social Justice Memes considers memes used or created by our movements to challenge the status quo and shape politics and pop culture.

With this list, our goal is to build the capacity of change agents, ourselves included, for understanding what memes travel far and wide with the most impact. If we know our work is to #changethestory, how do we deploy increasingly-effective memes that shape politics and culture towards the justice we all so desperately need?

Our annual Top Social Justice Memes considers memes used or created by our social movements to challenge the status quo, and the mass memes shaping politics and pop culture. Memes spread meaning through story via symbols and practices. More than mere internet graphics, memes are transmitted through writing, speech, gestures, images, rituals, and other phenomena. 2017 was an amazing year for stories and memes! This year we found ourselves noticing a  pervasive turn from the basic NO of protest, to a values-driven YES to the world we are fighting for.

This was quite a year for memes and stories. Our initial list of memes was noticably longer than previous years. Thanks to our trusty criteria, we managed to narrow it down to 10 Top Memes for 2016. It is also important to note that for the last three years Black Lives Matter has been on our Top Memes list. This year we found ourselves noticing that while BLM did not make it directly on the list, its influence and message can be seen throughout it. 

Top Memes considers memes used or created by our social movements to challenge the status quo, and the mass memes shaping politics and pop culture. For us, memes spread meaning through story, via symbols and practices and are transmitted through writing, speech, gestures, images, rituals, and phenomena.

From the silly to the serious, 2014 was another year filled with viral videos and twitter conversations gone global. In our annual installment of Top Memes, CSS has collected and analyzed the Top 14 Memes of 2014 that made waves throughout the movements for social and environmental justice (and a couple that just rippled through the interwebs).

The term MEME itself went viral in 2012, and there is still no sign of cute-cat-photo-fatigue. Our list of Top Memes considers memes used or created by our social movements to challenge the status quo, and the mass memes shaping politics and pop culture. For us, memes spread meaning through story, via symbols and practices and are transmitted through writing, speech, gestures, images, rituals, and phenomena.

2011 also gave us a glimpse of what is possible when we act together as a movement, united by a powerful meme: the 99%. And that’s why we are smartMeme—a strategy and training center dedicated to supporting social change from the grassroots with the power of narrative... a strategy center supported by people like you.