Tom Roberts is a doctoral researcher in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Brighton and is funded by the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership. Here they report on their experience of presenting at the Graphic Medicine Conference 2024 funded by the CAW PGR Mobilities fund.
The interdisciplinary spaces, discourse and practices that comprise the field of graphic medicine are suggested to be going through a ‘golden age’ (Wolf, 2022), and this year’s Graphic Medicine conference is a shining example of that. Held over three days in July at the Technological University of the Shannon, Athlone, Ireland, the conference theme was Draíocht, the Irish word for magic, and there was indeed something magical about the conviviality, creativity and inspirational ideas that I encountered there.
For the uninitiated, graphic medicine is “the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare” (Czerwiec et al, 2015:1), where comics are seen to be powerful tools for understanding experiences of illness and medical interventions. Such affordances as sequentiality and simultaneity, the ability to show interior and exterior states of being at the same time, and the metaphorical power of comics make them ideal not just for inquiries into health, but across the social sciences. The range of activities and overlapping areas of academic interest that can be included under the umbrella of graphic medicine were well represented in the conference programme. Presentations and exhibitions explored such topics as the use of comics for data representation and sharing information about medical topics; comics as a way of promoting education and understanding of health issues; autobiographical illness narratives in comics; and the subject of my own talk, deploying comics as a research method.
In this, I discussed the use of participatory comics-making in my doctoral research on mental health services, and the ‘magic’ that is possible with such an approach. While comics are not for everyone, and such collaborative research can be challenging at times, there were some positive, perhaps magical outcomes from this work. For one participant in particular, the pseudonymous Thaw, the project has been an unexpected journey of self-discovery as an artist. Whatever the merits of the methodology and what the findings of my PhD research may be, Thaw’s arrival at the space he calls ‘the Beautiful Mind’ through his art-making is some cause for celebration. Many thanks to Thaw, Jenny Milarski-Stermšek, Eli Lewis, Elaine, Lexi and Lola for joining me on this journey, as well as everyone else whose time and effort has contributed to my doctoral studies.
There were many highlights over the course of the conference. I will mention two here, shamelessly focusing on those that relate to my own work. Members of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing may be familiar with the work of Muna Al-Jawad, a colleague at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School who has presented at the Centre’s creative methods symposia, whose workshop I attended at the conference. Muna has been an inspiration since I first started exploring comics as a research methodology, and her assertion that “comics are research” (Al- Jawad, 2015) helped me gain confidence to pursue this avenue. For the session in Athlone, we tackled comics-making as a bridge between theory and practice, as a mode of analysis, where insights are gained by visualising the challenges we meet as researchers and healthcare practitioners, drawing them as comics.
Another workshop, led by Jennifer Syvertsen, Rocío Pichon-Rivière and Juliet McMullin, invited us to ‘trust the soup’; that is, to have the faith to dive into what they termed the “magical mix” of community-led research to promote collective wellbeing, and embrace the challenges presented by the diverse range of positionalities that can be encountered within such work. The activities we took part in here were some of my favourites. The picture above shows my doodlings of the animal avatars we were asked to create, a classic tool for self-representation in comics, and the development of these avatars as metaphors for the autonomous nervous system. You can decide for yourself how successful I have been in capturing this! Part of what I loved about this was the magic that comes from spontaneous creation, and I was reminded again that comics, with their simplicity and immediacy, are excellent for facilitating this.
Further graphic medicine magic came from the dispelling of any awkwardness around the networking aspect of the conference, an essential but not always relished feature of these events. In Athlone I found a warm and welcoming community whose enthusiasm for their work was inspirational. There was a strong feeling of being among like-minded friends, with all devoted to comics and invested in making a positive difference to healthcare issues.
With thanks to the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing at the University of Brighton for funding support to attend the conference, and with acknowledgements to the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership/ESRC for funding my doctoral studies.
–– Tom Roberts
Conference link: https://www.graphicmedicineconference.com/
Graphic medicine website: https://www.graphicmedicine.org/
References:
Al-Jawad, M. (2015) ‘Comics are Research: Graphic Narratives as a New Way of Seeing Clinical Practice’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 36:4, 369-374
Czerwiec, M. K., Williams, I., Squier, S., Green, M., Myers, K. and Smith, S. (2015) ‘Introduction’, in Czerwiec, M. K., Williams, I., Squier, S., Green, M., Myers, K. and Smith, S. (eds) Graphic Medicine Manifesto. Pennsylvania, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 1-20
Wolf, K. (2022) ‘Graphic medicine’s golden age?’, Visual Studies, 37:5, 420-439
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