• While all Laidlaw Scholars will be presenting their research at the Columbia Undergraduate Research Symposium in the fall, what are the more immediate expectations that you have for your research? Are you writing a paper? Will your research be part of a larger scientific study? Do you hope to produce an annotated bibliography that you reflect on down the line? Is your research now the first phase of a project you’ll continue to work on throughout the year, and/or next summer? Now that we are nearing the one month mark of the program, please write about your expectations for your research.

I'm planning to write a paper modeled after other papers I've seen in the journal Semiotica, as well as parts of Sianne Ngai's book Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting. I'm going to try to have an expository section which familiarizes readers with my object of study and the culture that surrounds it, an analytical section which close reads the object, and a theoretical section which both applies and challenges theory on ironic discourse that I've encountered through research. I might not finish this paper before the end of the project, so I might end up working on it during the summer after the program ends. I'll also put the main ideas of my paper on to a poster for the Research Symposium.

• Why does your research matter? Explain the significance of the question you are investigating, and why you are interested in it.

Here are some reasons why I think my research matters:

It's interesting, and I want to learn about my topic and grow as an intellectual.

The study of far-right politics is more relevant now than it has been in past years.

Through its focus on irony, youth, and the internet, my research investigates topics that haven't been explored by academia yet. As a young person who uses the internet, I intuitively understand the importance of irony within political discussion and messaging to (at least a part) of the young population. Comparing the cultural artifacts of young people today to young people in the past, I very hesitantly believe that our current moment is more irony-infused than other past moments.

The internet, whose effects on society and culture are by no means fully accounted for by academia, is definitely partially responsible for this cultural shift. I want to help others understand the effects of the internet on culture through the changing nature of the basic premises of social interaction.