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Paper short abstract:

This paper unearths the practice of collaboration between academic and non-academic illustrator. It demonstrates how to ethically convey the drama of the world of children who are stateless while revealing spaces of resiliency, creativity, and hope.

Paper long abstract:

Collaborating with illustrator Ben Thomas, we have embarked on a journey of taking the ethnographic written text and converting it into an ‘ethno-graphic’ novel. This piece presents the evolution of working with single images, organising single images into a sequence amplified with interview transcripts, to the creation of comic panels. Each sequence explores the qualities illustration can bring to ethnography: empathetic empathy, ethnographic anonymity, alternative modes of storytelling, and representing the intangible elements of participant’s everyday lives. Whilst this project is in-process, the potential of graphic anthropology, as an interdisciplinary activity, to aid the communication and analysis of ethnographic research beyond disciplinary boundaries offers new pathways for academic and empathetic exchange.

The creation of an ethno-graphic novel offers anthropologists an opportunity to discuss their research beyond the ethnographic text. Graphic anthropology must consider the ways in which images are curated, represent the lives of research participants and how stories are (re)told. This is not unique in anthropological practice. What is unique to graphic anthropology are the ways that an image can disrupt traditional preferences of the text - that is often laden with impenetrable language that only the trained can digest. The project I present here is an insight into the collaborative process that I have called 'retrospective (re)presentation': using the visual to offer alternative modes of (re)presentation to the written ethnographic text (Rumsby, 2020: 7).