Throughout the development of this project I stumbled across few obstacles, such as having to shorten my stories and simplify the characters, and time constraints. This meant that I had to cut out portions of the e-book in order to finish it on time.
One of the stories had been taken out, and it happened to be ‘Paula’s retirement’ one. Not only it was the last story I was working on, but also it was the least familiar area of knowledge for me. It was really important for me to include women from various backgrounds, however, I had to focus on fewer areas.
Here are 2 out of 6 pages for Paula’s story that were finished.
I decided to narrow down subject matters discussed in the e-book to the stories I already had finished and call it ‘PART 1’. Because of the size of issues I want to draw attention to with my project, creating just one comic-book would not be enough to give them consideration they need. By treating the first e-book as an introduction to the platform, I took away the pressure of including everything in it, as well allowed myself to work on this project beyond university.
It made sense to include mental health, motherhood, equal opportunities and office politics as main issues for the first e-book, as they seem of immediate importance to young audience. In PART 2 I would like to focus on racial discrimination at work affecting women, women working in male-dominated environments (i.e. women in science), and the importance of education for young females.
___________________________
There are a few pieces of research that I conducted, however not having time to properly analyse it or taking wrong measures, I did not succeed to fully incorporate them in my project.
One of the pieces is a study titled Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood and Reproduction. It’s a really interesting document, and it made me realise how motherhood impacts lives of women regardless of them being mothers or not.
I also released another survey to help me with further development of my characters. This was few weeks into COVID-19 induced lockdown, which had an impact on quality of responses. The survey was asking questions about work-life balance. During the lockdown a lot of people either lost their jobs, were put on furlough or were working from home. This situation had a huge impact on people’s work-life balance, making a lot of responses irrelevant to my characters. I decided not to analyse this survey further.
