- Convenors:
-
Letizia Bonanno
(University of Manchester)
José Sherwood Gonzalez (Manchester Metropolitan University)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Start time:
- 24 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
‘Crisis Through Comics’ seeks to explore the potential of graphic anthropology as both an analytical medium to discuss and generate political critique and create new avenues for public engagement and dissemination.
Long Abstract:
Concerning the 2008 European economic crisis, Kalantzis (2014) challenges anthropologists to go beyond the compulsive aestheticisation of poverty and destitution which has too often functioned as metonyms of the crisis. Such a provocation remains especially salient in today’s unfolding of multiple uncertainties, of which the COVID-19 pandemic is just one crisis amongst many.
The roundtable we are proposing aims to explore the entanglements of multiple crises in an increasingly interconnected world and the possibilities that graphic anthropology offers to unravel critical complexities and visualise ruptures and continuities. In contrast to film which uses the cut to compress or speed up time, the principal technology for the passage of time in comics is the transition between panels (McCloud 1993). Through the combination of image and text, comics have the capacity to navigate ruptures of time and space whilst transcending the temporal linearity of text-based ethnography. As event-based art applied to events of social relevance (Embury & Minichiello 2018), comics enable the ethnographer to capture the dynamics of unfolding events through the use of lines, shapes and colours with the potential to express the artist’s inner states and represent conflicting perspectives and temporalities.
This roundtable on ‘Crisis Through Comics’ seeks to engage with scholars to explore the potential of graphic anthropology as both an analytical medium to discuss and generate political critique and create new avenues for public engagement and dissemination. We thus invite contributions from scholars engaging with comics and illustrations as perceptive tools for ethnographic fieldwork and a novel mode of representation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Liz Churton (Northern Film School, Leeds Beckett University)
Paper short abstract:
Using examples from work in progress on my graphic novel, 'The Things that Shaped Me', I will share my methodological and practical approaches to writing about real and imagined, past and present, traumatic events.
Paper long abstract:
Using primarily evocative auto-ethnographic methodology, I'm currently writing a graphic novel which tells a first person story navigating a complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter, set against the backdrop of the broader social issues of the pandemic lockdown. Crisis and trauma are central themes of my story. As the narrative develops, I pay particular attention to how the simultaneous personal, political and social narratives are interwoven. By straddling time, generations, realities and fantasies, I attempt to question the relationship between the present, the past and the future.
I will focus on the following aspects of my methodology:
- Evocative auto-ethnography.
- Fiction-based research.
- Comics-based research.
- Wordless-comics based research.
- The special relationship between trauma, memory and auto-ethnography.
I will look at the practical aspects of writing this graphic novel in relation to :
- My use of abstraction, imagery, allegory and anthropomorphism in the
construction of my narrative.
- Managing time and temporality
- Developing characterisation
- Responding to contemporary events as they unfold
- Integrating social and political commentary with individual emotions
Each of these aspects will be accompanied by illustrations from my graphic novel. work in progress.
Jiazhi Fengjiang (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to explore the practice of graphic anthropology as an alternative means of presenting ethnography. It discusses its potentials for public engagement and cross-sector collaborations.
Paper long abstract:
In the growing field of graphic anthropology, drawing has been used as a supplementary research method and comics as an alternative means of presenting ethnography. This paper seeks to explore the kind of contexts, stories, and experiences that varying forms of graphic anthropology are particularly apt to present. It discusses the potentials of graphic anthropology for public engagement and cross-sector collaborations.
Laura Haapio-Kirk (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore how graphic anthropology shared on digital platforms can become a valuable tool in remote fieldwork, as a way to both present work back to research participants, and to extend dialogue with them and a broader public.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will explore how graphic anthropology shared on digital platforms can become a valuable tool in remote fieldwork, as a way to both present work back to research participants, and to extend dialogue with them and a broader public. In this paper I will present digital drawings made upon my return from fieldwork, during the covid-19 pandemic. My conversations with interlocutors back in Japan continued online, and often touched upon their experiences of the pandemic. I started to illustrate these stories, with their permission, and share them on Instagram. I found that even though I could not be physically present in my fieldsites, by creating these visual stories and showing them to my participants I was able to extend ethnographic dialogue. Often, by sending them illustrations they would then respond with further insights and additional elements to add to the stories. In this way, illustration proved a valuable tool to involve my participants more directly in the co-creation of ethnographic knowledge, and was a medium to present their experiences of the covid-19 pandemic to a broader audience than is typically possible in anthropological dissemination.
Jacek Wajszczak (The National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explore refreshing potential of non-realistic end experimental ethnographic illustration. Presentation based on fieldwork experiences.
Paper long abstract:
If we believe in drawing, what kind of drawing we looking for: beautiful, realistic, expressionist or technical? Ethnographic drawing – this classical and contemporary are often so gorgeous and brilliant. The raw drawing also can be lovely. So, if we need pencils and ink as a new way of aestheticization of poverty and injustice?
One of the main idea of ethnography is to explore alternative, unusual and unconventional practice and way of thinking. How to do in the fieldwork? What are the possibilities of nonviolence and equal form of documentations? How to change (overthrow) the dominations of beauty?
We don’t have to remind the power of photography and movie. So maybe with the black ink we enlighten us?
Based on my fieldwork I want to propose idea of “anarchistic ethnography illustration”.
First, I keen on the possibility to catch the bits, smells, sounds, dirties, anxiety and unrest pulsating around, because the power of drawing based on the fieldwork experiences. Second, I sketch this screeches with mine and interlocutors analyses and brainstorms (why not drawing together?). It’s mix of fieldwork diaries, snapshots and scientist diagrams all blended and reading as multidimensional illustration.
Maybe it’s sound crazy, but this kind of experiment could give as a possibility to refresh our thinking, mindfulness and tenderness in the future works.
Nicole Au Yeung
Paper short abstract:
In a life history interview with Julie the knitter, in order to encompass the a series of past events without being too emotionally vulnerability - an experimental ethnographic method: animated illustration was adapted as a mean to strike a balance between explicitly and immersive communication.
Paper long abstract:
This life history interview was conducted Canterbury, Kent - with Julie the knitter in a café.
In human society, certain visual symbols could trigger a positive feeling of being enchanted, that provoke people’s desire to possess it. Accordingly, institutions that specialized in producing goods with enchanting visual symbols are deemed as visual artists or visual designers. Being an ethnographer with a visual art background, I think my habitual sensitivity in remembering certain visual symbols could serve as an aesthetic tool to thick description. Hence, I did not record any events on site, instead, I made infinite animated images few hours later to make use of my selective memory - also to avoid causing disturbance to the respondent.
In another sense, animated illustrations made private matters sharable and reviewable to a broader audience. In the observation, there were various examples of how the respondent would found her life events slightly embarrassing to share verbally, however when they were presented as remembrance of a past moment, she would find it touching. In this context, the art of animated illustrations is an abstract presentation method to fight an overly explicit reviewal without withdrawing the truths. The enchantment here lies in a humanly attempt to resist metaphysical laws by materializing an abstract kinship relationship, as to preserve a specific time and space in one’s life.
Attached the presentation prototype in the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oXTM67w6dPADfsOnKqkpNER1o-rhxR5p/view?usp=sharing