Dr. Harriet EH Earle. Photo: Sheffield Hallam University
We are happy to announce that Dr Harriet EH Earle FHEA, Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Sheffield Hallam University, will present a keynote.
Harriet Earle (Hattie) is a lecturer and researcher in comics and popular culture. Her current research brings fibre arts and needlework into conversation with comics. What connections can we make between these two artistic forms and to what end? If we broaden our working definitions of comics to include narrative needlework, how does our understanding of both fields change – who is included and what is gained? Hattie considers the politics and poetics of the needle as a tool for creating narratives that give voice and power to [previously] silen[ced/t] communities.
Symposium at Malmö University November 15–16, 2024.
Comics, with their unique blend of text and visualization, offer a rich field for artistic research, particularly in terms of their material components from the techniques used in creating the comic to the tools used to reproduce the comic. As an artistic research symposium, Drawing Connections aims to look at the material aspects of comics creation, exploring how these elements shape storytelling within the medium. While comics are a globally practiced form of storytelling, much remains to explore about the tools, techniques, and tactility that contribute to what makes the story tick.
The symposium will address the role of comics in artistic research to emphasize how practical research in comics can facilitate inquiry and generate knowledge, particularly in understanding and innovating the narrative structures within the medium. To that end, we want to invite reflexive practitioners as well as researchers who make comics to test theories on comics, but also those whose research focus on the materiality of comics production. While we recognize the significance of digital production and publishing in comics, our discussions this time will exclusively explore the materiality and craftsmanship of analog comics.
The symposium will take place at Malmö University and is arranged by MUCH (Malmö University Comics Hub) in collaboration with the Swedish Comics Archive and is designed to showcase how comics serve as a unique platform for narrative innovation, critical inquiry, and interdisciplinary dialogue. MUCH is a platform för research, artistic development, and cooperation within the field of comics, hosted by the School of Arts and Communication (K3) at Malmö University.
We welcome submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Comics as a methodology: Looking at how comics can be used as a method to explore complex ideas about narrative structure.
The aesthetics of comics: Looking at how comics artists can use design and layout to influence the narrative experience.
Exploring production: Looking at how comic book production – including technological and material constraints – has influenced storytelling styles and formats.
Materiality and medium specificity: Looking at the physical aspects of comics (such as material quality, publishing techniques, and formats) and their impact on the development of comics as an art form.
Archival research in comics: Understanding archival materials in the historical context of comic production and how past practices influence current trends.
Future directions: Anticipating new trends, technologies, and methodologies in the creation and study of comics.
Deadline for submission of 300-word abstracts and a short author note (c.150 words): June 30, 2024 to oskar.aspman@mau.se
We hope you will join us in exploring the aesthetic, narrative, and theoretical potential of comics!
Dr. Harriet EH Earle. Photo: Sheffield Hallam University
We are Happy to announce that Dr Harriet EH Earle FHEA, Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Sheffield Hallam University, will present a key-note.
Harriet Earle (Hattie) is a lecturer and researcher in comics and popular culture. Her current research brings fibre arts and needlework into conversation with comics. What connections can we make between these two artistic forms and to what end? If we broaden our working definitions of comics to include narrative needlework, how does our understanding of both fields change – who is included and what is gained? Hattie considers the politics and poetics of the needle as a tool for creating narratives that give voice and power to [previously] silen[ced/t] communities.
The Organization Studies Group and the platform of Collaborative Future Making hereby invite for the 3rd symposium at Malmö University on the theme of storytelling and collaborative future making. The symposium will take place 7-8 May 2024. We invite a varied group of scholars from disciplines like design studies, leadership and organization studies, communication, comics research, art, architecture, education and urban planning.
The theme Storytelling and Collaborative Future Making addresses collaborative responses to making a sustainable and common future within diverse areas mentioned above. A common thread in the symposium is to explore the role that storytelling can have in crafting ethical foundations for work, organization, design, architecture, education and urban development.
Storytelling and collaboration for earthly survival mix with questions concerning how to collaborate and organize for human rights. While the 17 SDGs have been successful in mobilizing attention to questions concerning sustainability and inclusion, the embedded idea of balancing profit, people, and planet in actual strategies and practices seem to be off-track in practicing sustainable and inclusive development. Sustainability and inclusion are more and more at risk of becoming empty signifiers. Therefore, this symposium presents new ideas, concepts and approaches that allows for new understanding of how to work with all aspects of sustainability.
The symposium explores new ideas and approaches that mix storytelling and collaboration with questions concerning human rights and our relations to nature. These approaches might range from new embodied, relational, and material understandings of storytelling, the problematic and complex relations between small stories and grand narratives, visual narratives/comics, the relations between places, spaces, and stories, post-human, transhuman and Gaia storytelling, feminist, transgender, or queer storytelling. We also invite contributions of how to research and write differently in ways in which we take upon us our earthly responsibility. Such contributions may be inspired by engaged scholarship, reflexive inquiry, post-qualitative inquiry, or speculative fabulation. Finally, we also invite new approaches to understand the details how we work and collaborate and how they mix with issues concerning human rights and nature. These might comprise ideas from performative approaches to accounting, logistics, learning, collaboration, and planning.
If you want to join us, please submit an abstract of app. 500 words by 5 April 2024.
The event is free of charge. We don’t offer any accommodation, lunch, or dinner. We will make space for social arrangements in Malmö and organize a joint meeting place for dinner for those who are interested. Please send any queries to Kenneth, Hope or Per-Anders using the following emails. The venue for the symposium will be announced later.
Call for Papers‘Comics and/as Resistance’ Thursday 22 June and Friday 23 June 2023 In person at the University of Oxford (UK) and online
This conference seeks to bring together a wide range of scholars and creators to explore the poetics and politics of resistance within comics and graphic literature. Comics is a highly diverse and versatile medium, able to speak across boundaries, languages, temporalities, and cultures. This kind of formal flexibility makes it a particularly potent form for mediating resistance and resistance narratives. We understand resistance as a theme in a broad sense, from acts of political defiance to cultural practices that challenge perceived hegemonies. Resistance can also be a useful concept with which to examine the way that comics as a medium engages with categorizations, ideas about cultural legitimacy, and dominant forms of storytelling and historical representation. How are stories and histories of resistance mediated through comics? How are resisters and their agency depicted? How do comics creators contest dominant narratives and formal expectations and constraints? How is ‘resistance’ conceived of and enacted within the comics medium?
We invite papers that engage with these questions, and with resistance more broadly as a theme and/or as a mode of critical enquiry. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
· Depictions and/or mediations of historical acts of resistance, resistance networks, and the role of comics within cultural memory
· Representations of contemporary resistance movements
· Examples of comics being used to challenge dominant/hegemonic discourses and/or contribute to political discourses of resistance
· Formal conceptions of resistance within comics, for example the use of sound as a means of ‘resisting’ the silence of the medium; forms of hybridity than could be understood as resistance between text and image; resistance through the use of frames, the gutter, and text
· Histories of publication, distribution, and reception, particularly within transnational and global contexts
· Comics and/in translation
· Issues of genre, such as tensions between graphic fiction, memoir, and non-fiction
· The role of comics within pedagogies of resistance
· Comics as a collaborative form of resistance
· Comics and/as adaptation
· Graphic journalism
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers to be delivered in English.
Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) and a short biographical note (max. 75 words) to Dr Alex Lloyd (Lead Convenor, Oxford Comics Network) and the conference organising committee (Laura Bergin, Cailee Davis, Carolin Gluchowski, Luise Morawetz), using this form: https://forms.office.com/e/B6rsF2Fka5.
The deadline for submissions is 31 January 2023. Notifications will be made by 15 February 2023. A publication of selected papers is planned.
The Oxford Comics Network at the University of Oxford (UK) brings together students, academics, and practitioners from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to explore the power, politics, and potential of the comics form.
