Memes are a key feature of participatory digital cultures and have been found to play an important role in collective identity formation. Limited scholarship has explored the role of memes within closed communities, where perceived privacy and trust may impact the ways users demarcate the in-group (us) and out-group (them) through humor. This article draws on analysis of semi-structured interviews with Australian donor-conceived people (people conceived with donor sperm or eggs) and a collection of memes they shared. We take an interdisciplinary approach to analysis, combining reflexive thematic analysis informed by interpretive traditions within sociology with an analysis that applies the iconization framework from social semiotics. Our findings explore how donor-conceived people view memes as: texts that “only we get,” that are “light and fun” and that provide “a way to deal with emotions.” We conceptualize memes as bonding icons: semiotic artifacts which foreground shared feelings and invite alignment around a collective identity. More broadly, we argue that “getting” a meme requires alignment with the values construed, a process which reinforces ties to the community. In doing so, we explore how everyday social and linguistic practices contribute to individuals’ sense of belonging.

There is a pressing need to facilitate sensitive conversations between people with differing or opposing views. On video-sharing app TikTok, the diverse experiences of donor-conceived people and recipient parents sit uneasily alongside each other, coalescing in hashtags like #donorconceived. This article describes a method ‘Situated Talk’ which uses TikToks to facilitate a reflexive encounter, drawing on three areas of scholarship: media ethnography and elicitation, researcher reflexivity and duoethnography/collaborative autoethnography. We describe how we, as a donor-conceived adult (Giselle) and a queer woman who would need donor sperm to have a child (Clare), employed TikToks from #donorconceived as prompts to facilitate a sensitive conversation and elicit situated insights. We explore three central insights from applying our method: (1) discomfort as a productive tension; (2) unresolved dilemmas; and (3) discovering parallels in experience. Using TikToks as stimuli, ‘Situated Talk’ contributes an innovative method for generating grounded social media insights.

The digital age is characterised by unprecedented access to technologies to understand our bodies, genetics and family histories. The last decade has seen a growing uptake of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, which is (re)shaping individuals’ identity narratives. Drawing on data from a national online survey with Australian donor-conceived people (N = 91) and semi-structured interviews (N = 28), we conceptualise DNA results as a genetic narrative that coexists with other sources of identity information such as familial narratives, medical records and experiential knowledge from peers. Our analysis derived three themes: truth – how DNA results disrupted ontological security and prompted confrontation; proof – how DNA testing was valued and legitimised, especially compared with medical records; and sleuth – how DNA testing was leveraged in agentive practices. In doing so, we explore how processes of (dis)trust shape the forms of identity information individuals seek out, believe and rely upon to position themselves within relational and socio-technical webs.

The health and social ‘after-effects’ of caring are well established, yet the way carers experience pathways out of caring remains under-researched. In this article, we analyse qualitative free-text responses (n = 1,746) from a national survey of Australian carers to explore current and former carers’ concerns, opportunities and preferences around care endings. Our thematic analysis derived three key findings: (1) anticipation and fears for the care recipient; (2) prospects for life after caring; and (3) responsibility, recognition and loss. We engage with scholarship on the moralities of caring to discuss carers’ precarious relational and social positions, and their uncertainties around how caring ends.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Carers worry about how care recipients will be looked after in the future in the carer’s absence, especially in situations where the carer is frail or ageing.</li><br /><li>Carers also worry about their own futures and life after caring, including fears about re-entering the workforce, housing and superannuation, as well as issues of loss and loneliness.</li><br /><li>For some carers, the imagined care ending does not ultimately constitute the end of their caring responsibility in practice; for example, many carers continue to provide considerable care for those in supported accommodation.</li><br /><li>Understanding how carers experience and make sense of care endings is important for improving support for current and former carers.</li></ul>

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Facebook groups represent an important resource for donor-conceived people to access information, seek advice and share their experiences with their peers. Limited research has considered how donor-conceived people create supportive relationships with peers through social media or how this form of social support contributes to donor-conceived people’s health and wellbeing. This work in progress outlines the ‘search-for method’, a practical user-led tool for discussing instances of participation in Facebook groups. The ‘search-for method’ involves inviting participants to search for their name in the search bar of a Facebook group, thereby retrieving data of all instances they have posted in the group. This paper reports on initial findings from applying the ‘search-for method’ to semi-structured interviews with administrators and members (N=30) of Facebook groups for donor-conceived people from across Australia. The ‘search-for method’ enabled the participant and researcher, as co-analysts, to track and examine specific instances of participation and interaction in the group. By scrolling through content on their own device, participants could decide how to frame their stories of support and whether to disclose sensitive information or omit experiences they did not wish to discuss. Broadly, this approach illuminated how individual and collective donor-conceived identities emerged and evolved with and through online group platforms. In doing so, it provided a framework for understanding sociality between donor-conceived peers longitudinally. This paper contributes to understandings of how digital affinities and peer intimacies develop in Facebook groups over time.

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