Graphic Possibilities is a research workshop in the Department of English at Michigan State University. This research workshop engages with comics through two interrelated branches, critical inquiry and engaged pedagogy, as a means of bringing together faculty and graduate students with current and burgeoning interests in comic studies. Critical inquiry manifests in any number of ways through comics, including treating comics as data, comics as scholarship, and comics as critical-making, what Stacey Robinson and John Jennings term to be a methodological approach that insists scholars engage with broader critical and cultural conversations through the act of making comics. Alongside of this, we explore how scholar-practitioners can make pedagogical interventions about/through the comics medium in an effort to develop new strategies for teaching and working with comics pedagogically.
Faculty coordinator: Julian Chambliss
Graduate Coordinators: Nicole Huff and Sinclair Portis
FEATURED PUBLICATIONS:
Chambliss, Julian Carlos, Nicole Huff, Kate Topham, and Justin Wigard. 2022. “Days of Future Past: Why Race Matters in Metadata” Genealogy 6, no. 2: 47. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6020047
Topham, Kate, Julian Chambliss, Justin Wigard, and Nicole Huff. 2022. “The Marmaduke Problem: A Case Study of Comics As Linked Open (Meta)data”. KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 6 (3):1-8. https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.225
FEATURED PODCAST EPISODE:
Episode 15: “Rachel Marie-Crane Williams” (Summer, 2022)
Tune in for a special episode of the Graphic Possibilities Podcast with special guest Dr. Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, the newly-minted Dean of the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). She is the author of Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (2021) and Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (2021).
What has she learned about telling the story of race in the United States through comics? What lessons can we take from her experience in the classroom? In this conversation, we ask Professor Williams to reflect on using comics to tell stories about race and social justice.
You can find more about Dr. Williams’ work here: http://rachelwilliams.squarespace.com/