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

UPCOMING EVENTS:

50 States of Comics: Illinois

In this workshop, we will work with titles like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and others that were published in Illinois as we update Wikidata entries linked to the Comic Art Collection! Further, this event will build from our previous Wikidata-edit-a-thons in which participants edited and updated entries linked to the Comic Art Collection. Register for the event here.

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:

A Conversation with Dr. Lonny J. Avi Brooks

Dr. Lonny J. Avi Brooks is an associate professor in communication at California State University, East Bay. As the Co-Principal Investigator for the Long Term and Futures Thinking in Education Project, he has piloted the integration of futures thinking into the communication curriculum. As a leading voice in Afrofuturism, Brooks contributes prolifically to the field through diverse mediums, including numerous journals, book chapters, conferences, exhibitions, and festivals in the United States and worldwide.

In this conversation, we talk about his views on Afrofuturism as a community practice, especially in light of his research on foresight and developing tools to create new future visions.  Dr. Brooks is one of the featured interviews in Afrofantastic: The Transformative World of Afrofuturism, a new documentary available at pbs.org.