Project

Drawing Unbelonging: Comics as Thinking, as Method, as Resistance

Program

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships

Department

English

Abstract

“Drawing UnBelonging” is a multi-modal project that uses comics as a medium of inquiry and a method to record, analyze, and narrate complex stories from the margins image-textually. It advances the field through not just textual analysis but through the practice of drawing comics with an experimental approach and expands the ways in which art-based research espouses a more equitable future for all. As a Graphic-Medicine-centric project, it engages the sociopolitical through the lens of the personal, to critically look at pressing issues of our time, and to draw attention to systemic and interconnected issues pertaining to race, gender, disability and environmental inequality. It is itself a long-form comic that harnesses the visual effect of the medium to evoke a sense of urgency, in order to establish how belonging is usually tied to the trouble of conforming, rather than to the issue of a geographical space.