Congratulations to Hayley Brabazon from Dublin City University Library, whose blog post was highly commended in the CONUL Training and Development Library Assistant Blog Awards 2025.
It started with a thirst trap. Specifically, Jack Chambers, then newly appointed Minister for Finance, shooting hoops and shaking hands on TikTok to the tune of ‘I’m looking for a man in finance… trust fund… 6’5... blue eyes…’. It was supposed to be a fresh-faced, youth-focused announcement. Instead, it felt like the pilot episode of Crisis of Identity: Ministerial Edition - a man toggling between LinkedIn gravitas and TikTok frenzy.‘This is for bored middle-aged housewives,’ one student muttered. Another said he looked ‘sound enough - like someone your ma might vote for.’ And that’s where the conversation took off.
This wasn’t just a TikTok. It was a case study in media messaging; platform-native, visually slick, and strategically weird (Green, et al., 2022). Chambers wasn’t speaking to youth voters, so much as at them, via a medium and algorithm designed to bypass critical thinking and go straight for the vibes (Felaco, 2025). And it worked - kind of. They remembered it. They mocked it. They mocked me for thinking this is the kind of thing they’d find funny. But then they started asking: Why this format? Why this tone? Why the basketball? Why the bad attempt at a thirst trap?
Welcome to History in Your Hands, a critical literacy outreach programme, with class one disguised as a meme class. Designed to support Leaving Cert History students working on their Research Study Reports (RSRs), the programme blends archival propaganda with TikToks, internet culture, and just enough strategic cringe to get the room talking. Our aim? To make students not just better researchers, but sharper readers of the world around them.
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| Image 1: St Vincent's students taking a closer look at 20th Century Propaganda (History in Your Hands, 2024). |
We didn’t just ask them to read a pamphlet. We asked them to read the room… and the algorithm. Because here’s the thing: students don’t need help using the internet. They need help reading it. The old-school checklist model of information literacy (spot the typo, check the domain name) doesn’t cut it any more. The most dangerous misinformation isn’t obviously fake; it’s emotionally slick, visually credible, and shared by that one cousin who ‘doesn’t trust the mainstream media’ (World Economic Forum, 2025).
Academic libraries can’t afford to sit that one out. In an age of deepfakes, microtargeted disinformation, and algorithmic radicalisation, outreach is not an optional extra. It’s the front line. If we’re serious about equipping students to navigate complex information environments, we have to meet them where they scroll and teach them how to pause (World Economic Forum, 2025). That’s what History in Your Hands tries to do. We paired 1922 propaganda posters with TikTok parodies. We analysed slogans, colour palettes, camera angles. We asked: Who is this for? What emotion is it trying to trigger? What’s left out? Then, the students made their own. Some were genuinely funny. All were deeply clever. And what they revealed was this: with the right formatting, any topic can be manipulated just enough to shift a narrative.
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| Image 2: Reimagining the 1916 leaders through the lens of internet culture (History in Your Hands, 2024). |
And it worked. In two of the participating schools, 100% of students said they’d now think more critically about who creates digital content and why. In the third, over 84% said the same. That’s not just recall. That’s transformation. Throughout the programme, students also learned how to identify credible sources, navigate archives, and write up their research. But underneath all that structure was a deeper challenge: to look at information not just as content, but as persuasion. To question the aesthetics of credibility. And to realise that media literacy is as much about affect and intention as it is about citation style.
CONUL’s
Shaping Tomorrow strategy talks about Connections & Community and One Voice. But it’s not just about infrastructure, it’s about interruption. Academic libraries have the ethical mandate to intervene in how students engage with information. We’re just not there to tell them what to think. But we can help them see how they’re being asked to think - and by whom. So yes, it started with a TikTok thirst trap. But it ended with students dissecting the emotional economy of propaganda, the mechanics of manipulation, and the weird political semiotics of TDs in suits holding basketballs. In the age of disinformation, outreach needs to meet students where they’re at. And that’s how academic libraries help shape tomorrow: one slightly awkward scroll at a time.
Bibliography:
Green D, Polk XL, Arnold J, Chester C, Matthews J, 2022. ‘The Rise Of TikTok: A Case Study Of The New Social Media Giant’, Management and Economics Research Journal, 8(1), pp 1-6.
Felaco, C., 2025. ‘Making Sense of Algorithm: Exploring TikTok Users’ Awareness of Content Recommendation and Moderation Algorithms’, International Journal of Communication, 19, pp 1081–1102.
World Econnomic Forum (2025) Rethinking Media Literacy: A New Ecosystem Model for Information Integrity. Available at:
Images:
History in Your Hands, 2024. St Vincent’s students taking a closer look at 20th century propaganda. [image 1] Dublin: DCU Library. Unpublished outreach project material.
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