Tag Archives: pedagogy

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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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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“You’ve got to draw it if you want to see it”: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method

My teacher Linda Schele said those words to me years ago when teaching me about the iconography of ancient Maya sculptures. She’d given me an assignment: to make sense of the carved stone monuments from the ancient site Quirigua, in south-east Guatemala. All I had were photocopies of Alfred Maudsley’s 1880s photographs, and I was having trouble distinguishing meaningful elements from the convoluted Baroque tendrils and curls on these elaborate carvings. I brought my photocopies to her house, and the first thing she did was put one on a light-box, taping a sheet of tracing paper on top, saying, “You’ll never see a thing just staring at it on paper! You’ve got to draw it if you want to see it.” read more…

  • dateFebruary 20, 2015
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  • posted byAndrew Causey
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