[Current] 01 NEW How to Know Things with Comics - Summer 2025

Class Number:

760-01

INSTRUCTOR:

Adam Rosenblatt

TIME:

Tuesdays, 5-7:30 PM

LOCATION:

GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive

Description:

Comics and other graphic narrative formats offer unique properties for thinking about, producing, and disseminating research. This class is a research community and laboratory, where students with varied interests (which may not initially be comics!) can explore these properties and apply them to their own research.

In his classic treatise on the medium, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines comics as “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” To know things with comics, then, means to know them both visually and textually, as well as to foreground how ideas and experiences are assembled into “deliberate sequence.” As McCloud also argues, it also means attending to what is not depicted on the page–the “gutter” or gaps between the panels, the absences that we elide whenever we construct a story.

Comics allow researchers to share rich visual information while also foregrounding the subjective nature of what we see. Comics can manipulate the experience of time as well as place, creating disjunctures between image and text that might, for example, emphasize the persistence of memory in the present, or use blank or unintelligible word balloons to signal translation issues or the limits of speech. Due to these properties and others, as well as a rapidly diversifying world of comics creators and readers, we are now in the midst of a boom in research-based graphic narratives, including various forms of “applied cartooning”: graphic ethnography, graphic medicine, and comics journalism. In this class, we read works from all of those categories, many of them situated outside of the United States. We analyze the building blocks of graphic narrative, its affordances for research, the ethics of representing real people via drawings, and more. Readings also include comics theory, scholarship on drawing and visual ethnography, and other methodological reflections.

The course features field experiences, guest speakers, and workshops with graphic narrative creators. Students keep a graphic journal, where they record their lives, what they notice, and responses to what they read. But perhaps most importantly: every time we meet, we make something. Assignments prompt students to analyze the elements of comics research from the style and structure of entire works down to the basic building blocks of the page and panel, and then to try out the techniques they identify. Students will have at least one opportunity to facilitate a community workshop on making comics and zines, as part of the ongoing Durham-based project GNOME (Graphic Narrative on the Move for Everyone). For their final project, they will present some research of their own–which can be part of a larger project (e.g. for the master's project in Graduate Liberal Studies)–in a graphic narrative format.

This course requires an interest in visual methods and expressions, but no prior experience or training in drawing. Great comics can be made with stick figures, collage, photos, and even abstract shapes (and ineffective comics can feature technically accomplished drawings!).

A sample reading list is as follows:

Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

Leonie Brialey, Raw Feels

Tings Chak, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention

Andrew Causey, Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method

M.C. Czerwiek et al., The Graphic Medicine Manifesto

Michael Fakhri and Omar Kouri, United Nations Report on “Palestine and the Right to Food.”

Sherine Handy, Coleman Nye, Sara Bao, and Caroline Brewer, Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution

Salla-Maria Korhonen, Drawing the Camp: Graphic Essay of Community Organising, Local Aid and ‘Refugee Humanitarianism’ in Irbid Refugee Camp

Deena Mohamed, Shubeik Lubeik

Ellen O’Grady, How Are We to Live? Comics for a Free Palestine

Adam Rosenblatt, “Engraved: A Family Forensics”