Drawings from my research on childbirth in California created an opportunity for sharing reflections on fieldwork and “seeing.” Birth is a highly mediated experience, with ubiquitous images of happy, beautiful, peaceful babies and mammas crowding everything from packaging and magazines to instructional literature and advertisements for birth professionals. This birth imagery has a minor counterpart from the activist community that …
Series: Image + Text
Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye’s Lissa
Lissa: A Story About Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution
Written by Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye
Illustrated by Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer
Lettering by Marc Parenteau
University of Toronto Press, 2017. 304 pages.
For several years many anthropologists have engaged in questions about the possibilities of a graphic anthropology. “Graphic,” here specifically references comics and graphic narratives and …
Graphic Anthropology Field School
The Graphic Anthropology Field School (GrAFs) is a project launched by Expeditions, an independent network of scholars in the human sciences. For 11 years, we have been holding in Gozo (Malta) a summer school for anthropologists and social scientists, focused on the practice of fieldwork. Far away from sleepy lectures in gloomy classrooms, our aim has always been to …
Creative Collaborations: The Making of “Lissa (Still Time): a graphic medical ethnography of friendship, loss, and revolution”
Is there a widely accessible yet conceptually rigorous way to convey anthropological insights into the lived complexities and bioethical dilemmas that attend managing chronic illness in two vastly different contexts: the contemporary Arab world and the United States? As it turns out, there is: comics. At the time we began to explore this question, we had both been excited by …
Comics and the Medical Encounter
Editor’s Note: In March of 2013 the Annals of Internal Medicine added the Graphic Medicine series as part of their medical humanities features. As they describe, “Annals Graphic Medicine brings together original graphic narratives, comics, animation/feature, and other creative forms by those who provide or receive health care.” Most often the stories are from a physician’s own experiences and …
Graphic Medicine Manifesto
In organizing the 6th Annual Conference of Comics and Medicine, I frequently heard the refrain “Comics and medicine? What’s that? How do those two things go together?” Indeed, I even heard that comment from the comic book store manager whom I had asked to sell selected books at the conference. The Graphic Medicine Manifesto (2015) is a brilliant response …