I complained to Liz, who was here last weekend (wonderful, inspiring talk! slides here, video there) that I was getting bored with the election debates, of which there have been many, and she said, “So have fun! Make some memes!”

And so I started, and others chimed in. I set up a separate Facebook page, Atakan Memes, so as not to scare off any serious supporters who might be turned off by silly photos with slogans. Some are really just little ads, but some of them are closer to real memes – oh, not all of them follow the rules, but we’ve certainly had fun with them. Here are some of my favourites 🙂

This one, Scott made, arguing that our team should have buttons:

The SiB cat is a fixture at Studentsenteret, and has recently acquired its own Twitter account, where it considers applying for professorships in catemathics (kattematikk) and the like. Naturally, Professor Cat wonders whether the SiB cat will vote Catakan. (Thanks to Vegard for collaborating on this one!)

Scott created a whole series of posters for the various faculties that I rather liked. For some reason, the psychology one seemed to have quite impressive appeal, garnering many likes.

The IT-department is rebuilding the website in Drupal and has hired several Drupal people. So clearly we needed to appeal to that demographic too.

And then of course I tried to jump on the “Hey girl Audun Lysbakken” wagon. Not sure I quite pulled it off, but I had fun!

Here’s one that’s very boring visually but I thought was pretty effective as a quick response to a particularly worrying statement our opponent made in an interview on the day the election started, about wanting a “national division of labour” when it came to small subjects in the humanities. I wanted to get this message out fast, and I think it worked, because this particular issue was mentioned many times afterwards.

This next one was the first picture I tried making, actually, and it was on quickmemes.com or somewhere like that and I didn’t notice the lack of æ, ø and å until afterwards. Oh well.

And this one is from Twitter. Good for trekkies 🙂

The next one is about what was an important campaign issue for me – we have many international employees, and require that they all learn Norwegian within two years. The university provides excellent Norwegian classes for them, but no teaching release, so newcomers have to adapt to a new job in a new country AND learn a new language after a full day’s work. The teachers of Norwegian as a second language told us that this is a huge problem. Many employees drop out, and those who stick around aren’t able to concentrate fully. And to learn a new language, you really need to concentrate, for many hours a week.

I love this one that Scott made – oh, Kuvvet Atakan is a professor of seismology. So he does, indeed, know earthquakes.

Walter contributed this one, which impressively combines the Archaic Rap meme with Team Atakan’s commitment to improve the gender bias and hire more women!

And a comment to a comment I made in a debate 🙂

Here’s a great one Scott made the day before the election was over, from a photo he took at the Dali exhibition in Philadephia, I think.

And here’s a rather simple argument – simple that our opponents didn’t have any representatives from the humanities faculty, which is the largest faculty in the university. Obviously targeted at humanists!