– international conference in comics & visual studies
At the junction of comics and visual studies, this international conference aims to understand how popular media art contributed to the ludification of vision, training our eyes to see in playful, nonlinear and equivocal ways.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Mathieu Li-Goyette (UvA), Erin La Cour (VU), Toni Pape (UvA), and Rik Spanjers (UvA)
CREDITS
Poster | Romy Surprenant Volunteers | Teddie Meijer, Ananya Sambasivan, and Annie Wang
PARTNERSHIPS & SPONSORS
Amsterdam Comics Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) The European Research Council (ERC) Filmhuis Cavia Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) Research School for Media Studies (RMeS) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Universiteit van Amsterdam
The 4th International Comics Conference at Malmö University (12) 13–14 November 2026 Deadline: 15 April 2026, Notification of acceptance: no later than 30 April 2026.
How is narrative constructed and negotiated through the material forms and practices of comics? Building on Malmö University’s strong focus on storytelling and comics research this conference invites scholars, practitioners, and reflective creators to explore what it means to craft narratives that participate in the construction of social, political, or emotional realities. How do storytelling strategies in comics (sequencing, stylisation, visual rhythm) interact with material choices, identity, and imagination?
Possible questions include (but are not limited to):How can the tactile and physical engagement with comics as objects foster a unique sensory, emotional, and intimate connection between reader and creator?
•How do reader interpretations, participatory practices, fan engagements or living narrativesshape the storytelling in comics?
•What responsibilities do comics creators hold when representing contested histories, identities,or traumas?
•How do the material forms of comics differ across cultural contexts, and what can thesedifferences teach us about diverse storytelling traditions?
•What ritualistic or performative elements emerge in the making, reading, or sharing of comics?
•How can we preserve the material legacies of comics for future inquiry, ensuring that thephysical dimensions of the medium remain accessible for analysis and inspiration?
•In what ways do the stories we, as researchers, tell about the pioneers or ”the most influential”creators shape the discourse of comics studies? How do these academic narratives influence thefuture of the comics medium itself?
In line with the current public discourse, we also encourage reflections on canon formation, not only in academic discourse but also in publishing, teaching, curation, and practice. What comics do we preserve, study, translate, or showcase, and what falls through the cracks?
Submissions may take the form of academic papers, practice-based presentations, or hybrid formats. The first day (12 November) will serve as a pre-conference day in collaboration with the Comics Archive in Malmö, offering participants the opportunity to visit the archive and/or engage in focused research on specific materials. Pre-registration is required for this day.
Abstracts (max 300 words) and a short bio (max 100 words) should be submitted by 15 April 2026. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by 30 April 2026.The conference will be held on-site at Malmö University, Sweden. Further details including keynote speakers, registration, and programme will be announced during the summer of 2026.Contact: oskar.aspman@mau.se
The Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures hereby invites you to the 5th symposium at Malmö University, on the theme of storytelling and collaborative future-making. The symposium takes place 26-27 May 2026. We plan to construct a varied program with paper presentations, workshops, and spaces for dialogue. A common thread of the symposium is the exploration of storytelling’s role in imagining and co-creating futures. We invite papers on design, organization, literature, comics, visual storytelling, architecture, learning, education, urban development, and other fields. The symposium explores new ideas and approaches that blend storytelling and collaborative future-making, fostering critical and creative engagement among scholars to create better stories of the world. Such contributions may be inspired by love, art, post-qualitative inquiry, peculative fabulation, or others. They can focus on the role of imagination and making in relation to places, history, cultural heritage, craft, and community engagement. We also invite contributions on how to research and write differently in relation to learning and education.
If you want to join us, please submit an abstract of approximately 500 words by 24 April 2026 to one of the organizers, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Gunnar Krantz, or Per-Anders Hillgren. 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, Gunnar, or Per-Anders using the following emails. The venue for the symposium will be announced later.
Call for papers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm & Uppsala University, 22-23 April, 2026
Steering committee: Jan Baetens, Jaqueline Berndt, Jan von Bonsdorff, Gareth Brookes, Benoît Crucifix, Björn-Olav Dozo, Anna Foka, Isabelle Gribomont, Andre Holzapfel, Per Israelson, Gaëtan Le Coarer, Ilan Manouach, Pedro Moura, Everardo Reyes, Keith Tillford, Ray Whitcher
Today, the field of comics is undergoing a profound transformation marked by a growing heterogeneity of forms, formats, and production processes. From synthetic comics, operational images, data-driven visualization to embodied, non-visual comics, comics are expanding beyond the conceptual and historical frameworks that have traditionally defined it. Existing models in research— grounded in the artisanal craft traditions, narratology, text-image correlation, and human-centered authorship— are struggling to account for this rapidly diversifying landscape. Craft-based approaches might appear resistant or inadequate in the face of new technological practices that recombine production, circulation, and reception through computational logics.The current moment compels a broader redefinition of comics as fundamentally technical objects. The boundaries that once separated comics from technical and operational systems are dissolving. To grasp the full scope of these developments, we must account for comics as sites where technological processes are not external influences but internal engines — where creation is entangled with computation, standardization, and new modes of mediation. As computational processes— from machine learning to synthetic image generation and communication systems powered by computer vision— increasingly shape the creation, distribution, and experience of comics, it is no longer sufficient to understand the medium solely through the lenses of narrative, visual storytelling, or artisanal craft. Recognizing comics as engineered configurations of information, relational diagrams, and experimental knowledge structures is not a speculative gesture; it is a necessary step for understanding the profound transformation underway in the medium’s ontology, practice, and future potential.
Within this expanded computational landscape, comics increasingly function as sites of artistic research— experimental configurations that generate knowledge through making rather than merely representing it. As comics engage with computational systems, they become laboratories for investigating the material conditions of contemporary media production. These research-oriented practices extend beyond traditional academic boundaries. Rather than simply illustrating research findings, comics-as-research deploys their unique capacity for relational thinking— the medium’s inherent ability to orchestrate temporal, spatial, and conceptual relationships — to investigate how technical systems reshape creative labor, audience relations, and the very possibility of narrative meaning. This artistic research dimension positions comics not as objects of study but as active investigative tools, capable of generating insights about computational culture that emerge specifically through the medium’s hybrid technical-aesthetic operations.
We are pleased to announce a two-day international conference on April 22-23, 2026 at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and at Uppsala University dedicated to examining the rapidly evolving landscape of comics. Rather than framing this transformation solely as a rupture, the conference seeks to situate it within a longer history of computational rationality— a lineage in which the medium has continuously negotiated the demands of efficiency, scalability, and technical constraint. Our aim is to critically rethink comics not as passive recipients of technological change, but as active computational configurations: media fundamentally entangled with systems of automation, standardization, and information processing.
We welcome submissions addressing the following areas (among others):
Histories of automation and engineering in comics production and distribution Transformations in formats and workflows driven by technological change Comics as data: informatization, discretization, and database design Human-machine collaborations in past, present, and speculative comics practice Audience and user labor in automated platforms and circulation systems Data-mining and recirculation techniques in digital comics ecologies Machine subjectivities: authorship, intention, and expression in machinic agents Computational archiving practices: scraping, clustering, and vectorization Speculative and critical practices addressing automation and machinic mediation Industrial logics in comics: international and comparative perspectives Resistance to automation: sabotage, slow media, and disobedient design Operational aesthetics: the visual and affective languages of automation Speculative histories and alternative futures of comics as technical media Comics as simulations: diagrams, blueprints, and procedural environments Comics as artistic research methodologies: practice-based inquiry and knowledge production where comics are used to interrogate emerging technologies and social systems
We invite submissions for the following presentation formats:
Research Papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion): Traditional academic presentations suitable for theoretical, historical, or analytical work
Practice-Based Presentations (15 minutes + 15 minutes discussion): Presentations by creators, artists, and practitioners demonstrating work and reflecting on process
Interactive Demonstrations (30 minutes): Hands-on sessions showcasing new tools, platforms, or methodologies
Panel Discussions (90 minutes): Collaborative sessions bringing together multiple perspectives on specific themes
Lightning Talks (5 minutes): Brief presentations ideal for work-in-progress, provocations, or preliminary findings
Workshop Sessions (3 hours): Extended collaborative sessions for skill-sharing and collective exploration of tools and methods
Abstract length : 250 words Short bio: 150 words Deadline for abstracts: 1st December 2025 Notifications of acceptance: 30th December 2025 Send to conference@echochamber.be
– A research seminar focusing on comic-art and graphic noveling.
The starting point for the Everyday Comic-Art Network and a release for the presentation of the comic-art based project: Det är i vardagen det händer – Tecknade serier för att skapa tryggare grannskap (It happens in the everyday – Comic-art to create safer neighborhoods).
9 Dec 2025. 09:00 – 16:00 Location: Glashuset, HDK-Valand. Entrence Storgatan 43 or Vasagatan 50, Göteborg Additional info. Zoom link is provided.
Organizers: Mathieu Li-Goyette, Erin La Cour, Toni Pape, Rik Spanjers
At the turn of the 20th century, techniques of observation and of visual representation were achieving an exponentially fast industrial revolution of production, distribution, and reception. Presses and cameras were faster, more precise, and as their influence on society rapidly broadened, a whole new set of visual practices became available to artists. Since then, vision has become fully fragmented or accelerated, with the collapse of “classical models of vision and their stable space of representations. Instead, observation [became] increasingly a question of equivalent sensations and stimuli that have no reference to a spatial location” (Crary 1990). These advancements encouraged a perpetual deconstruction of vision prompting new techniques of representation, which are still ongoing in our technological age.
During this period, print and visual media developed new modes of combining words and images that both dynamize vision and normalize it in new directions. This results in media forms that playfully engage the eye in nonlinear visual explorations, forms that are implicitly forces of deinstitutionalization of subjects, framing, and usages. Examples can be found in comic strips and magazines, but also advertisements, games, miniatures, puzzles, rebus, travelogues and visual bibles.
This conference invites an intermedial reflection on the development of modes of reading and seeing in relation to constraints of production and distribution. We welcome contributions on subjects ranging from a medium’s early stages of development up to the present digital world, while addressing issues of readability, narrativity, interactivity, and/or materiality. How did new ludic modes of seeing develop from scientific observation to artistic production? What techniques did artists develop to increase the readability of their medium? How did they negotiate the tensions between originality and standardization? What new visual norms were established along the way?
Bringing together scholars and practitioners, the conference aims to understand how popular media art contributed to the ludification of vision, training our eyes to see in playful, nonlinear and equivocal ways.
We welcome submissions on any aspect of ludification in the visual arts and its adjacent practices. Please send an abstract (300 words maximum) with a title, bio, and a brief bibliography related to the paper (maximum of 5 titles) through this submission formby October 31st. We plan to announce decisions by November 21.
Bibliography
Beringer, Alex. 2024. Lost Literacies. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.
De Koven, Bernard. 2025. The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ensslin, Astrid and Alice Bell. 2021. Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gaudreault, André. 2009. From Plato to Lumière. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gidding, Seth. 2024. Toy Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Horstkotte, Silke and Nancy Pedri. 2022. Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Kashtan, Aaron. 2019. Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
LaMarre, Thomas. 2009. The Anime Machine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2007. Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth- Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, David. 1999. Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saguisag, Lara. 2019. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press.
The Comics Archive in Malmö has expanded significantly in recent years through large donations. To provide a better overview and inspire scholars to initiate new projects, Malmö University Comics Hub/much and The Comics Archive invites you to a full-day symposium where we will present some of the most important additions. During this full-day symposium, comic scholars will also provide different perspectives on comics research and parts of the collections will be presented thematically. The goal is to inspire you to initiate new research with the starting point in the archive’s unique and largely unresearched collections.
The Symposium will be in the form of presentations and workshop, so there will be no call for papers.
Target group: Comics-scholars and PhD-students.
Cost: Free.
Date: November 14, 2025.
Place: Malmö university, K3-Studio, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1 and The Comics Archive, Friisgaan 19b, Malmö.
Doctoral student in Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Culture and Society, the School of Arts and Communication, focusing on storytelling.
Work duties
Those appointed to doctoral studentships shall primarily devote themselves to their studies. Those appointed to doctoral studentships may work to a limited extent with educational tasks, research, artistic research, and administration. However, duties of this kind may not comprise more than 20 per cent of a full-time post (Higher Education Ordinance (HEO) Chapter 5, section 2).
The doctoral education concludes with a doctoral degree and comprises 240 credits, which corresponds to four years of full-time study. The programme consists of courses and an independent research project that is presented in a doctoral thesis. As a doctoral student, you will be expected to play an active part in the research and educational environment and, when applicable, in the research programmes of the Department/School.
The doctoral education is carried out within the academic environment storytelling at the School of Arts and Communication (K3). This environment explores narratives in various forms, with a special focus on what is traditionally described as aesthetic forms of expression and on journalistic/documentary storytelling. The media and art forms that are mainly in focus are literature, film, art, graphic novels and comics, photography, and journalism. Ongoing research projects deal with, among other things, literary representations of class, work, and the relationship between the urban and the rural, creative writing, comics, literary material in the trade-union press and documentary storytelling in various media. The doctoral student’s dissertation project shall contribute to the development of the research environment of storytelling.
The Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures hereby invites for the 4th symposium at Malmö University on the theme of storytelling and collaborative future making. The actual symposium will take place 13-14 May 2025. The 15th of May, we combine with the rest of the centre for a seminar on better stories with Professor Andrea Pető, Central European University and guest professor at Malmö University. We plan to construct a varied program with paper presentations, workshops and spaces for dialogue. For the symposium, 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 storytelling for Gaia, 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 16th April 2025 to one of the organizers, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Gunnar Krantz or Per-Anders Hillgren. 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, Gunnar, or Per-Anders using the following emails. The venue for the symposium will be announced later.
Location: Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée and Hoek 38, Brussels, Belgium
Tuesday 24 June – Wednesday 25 June 2025 (online)
Monday 30 June – Friday 4 July 2025 (in-person)ers
The Taste of Comics
Taste is constructed through culture, aesthetics and the senses. What is good taste and bad taste? In the past comics were aligned with trash culture evoking notions of good literature and bad literature, good art and bad art. How and why were these hierarchies constructed? Are they still relevant? Changing tastes can make a topic more appealing or less appealing and inform how we view a place, text, theme, author, or artist. Aesthetic tastes have informed the reception of styles such as the école de Marcinelle or Hergé’s clear line. There are issues of good taste and restraint, bad taste and excess in art movements from the Classical to the Gothic or the architectural taste of the Cités obscures. There are also issues of taste in the consumption of art or fashion as in, for instance, paper cut out dolls and makeover stories.
Speaking more literally, graphic gastronomy is filled with stories about taste and food in in autobiographies like Lucy Knisley’s Relish: My Life in the Kitchen. Food features prominently in manga of cookery and romance are found in manga such as Kitchen Princess by Natsumi Ando and Miyuki Kobayashi and LGBTQA+ manga such as Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday, or Jarrett Melendez’s Chef’s Kiss. Food features in instruction books like Robin Ha’s Cook Korean!: A Comic Book with Recipes and adventure stories skilfully whisked together with instruction as in Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki’s Oishinbo a la carte #1: Japanese Cuisine. Bakhtinian excess is evoked in characters such as Capitaine Haddock’s drinking, Garfield’s love of Lasagne, and Scooby Doo and Shaggy who will eat anything. Matter-Eater Lad, from the Legion of Superheroes, of course, can eat anything. Eating can also be dis-tasteful in stories such as Chew, a detective who gets psychic impressions from whatever food he eats. And at the opposite end of excess is the tragedy of famine in graphic novels like Red Harvest: A Graphic Novel of the Terror Famine in Soviet Ukraine (Michael Cherkas) or starvation as in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.As always, papers outside of this theme are also welcomed.
We are looking for papers based on, but not limited to, any aspects of taste such as:
· changing tastes in comics and graphic novels – e.g. a franchise or character
· artistic styles such as art nouveau, art deco, ligne clair
· kitsch, punk, anti-taste
· cultural tastes and traditions
· synesthesia – tasting words, colours
· graphic gastronomy, depicting food, recipes
· horror and dis-taste – ghouls, vampires, werewolves, cannibalism
· food and romance
· greed and excess
· feasting, fasting, famine
· appetite and the body
· changing appreciations of art and fashion, makeovers
· places and their gastronomic reputations: Belgium and beyond!
As always, papers outside of this theme are also welcomed.
We invite proposals for single 20-minute papers, 60- or 90-minute participatory workshops or roundtables, or three-paper panels. Please complete the online form at https://forms.office.com/e/cwa9dxQeYW, which includes details such as proposal title, your desired format (paper, workshop, panel, roundtable), co-presenter details, in-person or online, abstract (200 words) and biography (100 words). The online form will close at midnight UK time on 31 January 2025, and we will confirm acceptance by 1 March 2025.
We hope this whets your appetite. Please email TheIGNCC@gmail.com with any queries, and keep an eye on our website www.IGNCC.com for more updates and the latest news.
