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Accepted Paper:
Drawing Focus. Comics as ethnographic explorations.
Federico De Musso
(Leiden University)
Addressing the drawing of a comic about covid-19, the paper explores the multimodal possibilities of speculative narratives for knowledge dissemination. While comics is a heuristic tool for ethnographic analysis, they are also part of the information politics that surrounded the pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
The following paper addresses the potential of comic writing in anthropology. Based on the author's experience in writing a biographic and ethnographic comic about covid-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, the paper explores the multimodal possibilities of speculative narratives for knowledge dissemination. Drawing offer both a way to think, visualise, and tell alternative ways of relating to normative representations.
The comic format facilitated the development of a keen eye to discern both states and people's responses to covid, on the one hand, and to express personal accounts that were easier to tell through science fiction. The drawings contextualised everything that went beyond the ordinary in the first months of the pandemic - trying to offer relatable images to explain what was happening. Incorporating photo references into the drawings, this approach to comics facilitated an epistemology of juxtaposition - on the one hand, mixing real and fictional storytelling, and on the other, blending the indexical affordances of photography with drawings' non-indexical speculative prospects.
The ability to transcend the individual experience by addressing the collective trajectories in the pandemic shed light on the limits of speculative narrations. In a time were attempts to stem disinformation surrounding health security moved to clearly define what belonged to reality and what was fictitious, creating ethno-graphic montages may well be equipped to understand the implicit and explicit contours of sanctioned knowledge creation around both science and fiction.