Colleen McCool

Colleen McCool (yes, that is her real name) is interested in the intersection of memes and political communications. Her current work zeroes in on the increasing use of memes by Canadian political parties and the roles that political staffers play in creating and spreading branded memetic content. She is interested in understanding how staffer experiences of mediatisation influence this growing trend.

Colleen earned her master’s degree in social communications from the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivieres (UQTR), where she studied the motivations of Quebec-based political meme creators. Over the course of her graduate studies, she has contributed to work on election interference, public broadcasting, and social acceptability.

Outside of the department, Colleen is an active member of two research groups — the Groupe de recherche en communication politique (GRCP) and the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC). She currently serves as the president of the CSDC’s Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Fellows committee.

Thesis title: Memes as Partisan Media: A Staffer-Centric Approach to Understanding the Memes as Political Communications Tools

Publications:

McKelvey, F., Dubois, E., DeJong, S., Marinov, R., McCool, C., Huang, H., Clark, J., Yan, J. (2024). Incident Update 3︱Exploring incident replicability using commercial AI tools.