Announcing ethnoGRAPHIC: A New Series

Well, we’re just about finished our Graphic Adventures in Anthropology, and now that we have you primed, we’re thrilled to announce a new book series here at the University of Toronto Press called ethnoGRAPHIC: Ethnography in Graphic Form. Whether you are an aspiring artist, or just interested in the possibilities of this format as both a methodology and a unique way of communicating your research results, we welcome expressions of interest and discussions about potential collaborations. It’s a brave new world out there, and we’re convinced that many academics want to be more creative in how they reach their audiences. We hope this series will harness some of that creativity. read more…

  • dateApril 20, 2015
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  • posted byAnne
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Unflattening Scholarship with Comics

For this post, We sat down with Nick Sousanis to talk about the challenges and benefits of making a stronger connection between comics, scholarship, and pedagogy in higher education. Nick defended his comic dissertation last spring at Columbia’s Teacher College and the published book, Unflattening, is being published by Harvard University Press this month. read more…

  • dateApril 8, 2015
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  • posted byAnne
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Comics in the Community

It all started with the May 2006 LA Times Book Review, and a comic panel of Brian Fies’ mom receiving chemotherapy. Fies’ panel, entitled “Arrangement in Grey and Black,” from his comic Mom’s Cancer, shows his mother sleeping while receiving chemotherapy. At the time I considered the panel as another artifact of cancer’s culture. But the image never left me. read more…

  • dateMarch 27, 2015
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  • posted byJuliet McMullin
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Fieldwork Cartoons Revisited

In 1989 when conducting fieldwork in Masset, Haida Gwaii, I complemented my standard social anthropological toolkit of camera, cassette tapes (before the days of digital), and field notebooks with a small black sketchbook—my cartoon book. This proved to be a rewarding and useful means to tell an immediate story about fieldwork, drawn late at night, and before any photographs could be developed. I used the cartoons to start conversations with Haida community members, and we shared perspectives on the events I depicted—from the ordinary to the celebratory. read more…

  • dateMarch 23, 2015
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  • posted byGillian Crowther
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Teaching Comics in a Medical Anthropology and Humanities Class

True or false: Stick figures effectively convey complex emotions and experiences.

If you were to ask me this question a year ago, I would have confidently replied “false.” That was before I stumbled across Allie Brosh’s web comic “Hyperbole and a Half.” Brosh chronicles her adventures with cleaning, dogs, and depression through a crudely drawn pink stick figure with a strange yellow triangle atop her head. The triangle is supposed to be a ponytail, but it is open to interpretation. read more…

  • dateMarch 16, 2015
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  • posted byColeman Nye
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