Comics as a Research Practice: Drawing Narrative Geographies Beyond the Frame

Description

This book proposes a novel creative research practice in geography based on comics. It presents a transdisciplinary approach that uses a set of qualitative visual methods and extends from within the geohumanities across literary spatial studies, comics, urban studies, mobility studies, and beyond. Written by a geographer-cartoonist, the book focuses on ‘narrative geographies’ and embraces a geocritical and relational approach to examine comic book geographies in pursuit of a growing interest in creative, art-based experimental methods in the geohumanities. It explores comics-based research through interconnections between art and geography and through theoretical and methodological contributions from scholars working in the fields of the social sciences, humanities, literary geographies, mobilities, comics, literary studies, and urban studies, as well as from visual artists, comics authors, and art practitioners. Comics are valuable objects of geographical interest because of their spatial grammar. They are also a language particularly suited to geographical analysis, and the ‘geoGraphic novel’ offers a practice of research that has the power to assemble and disassemble new spatial meanings. The book thus explores how the ‘geoGraphic novel’ as a verbo-visual genre allows the study of geographical issues, composes geocentred stories, engages wider and non-specialist audiences, promotes geo-artistic collaboration, and works as a narrative intervention in urban contexts. Through a practice-based approach and the internal perspective of a geographer-cartoonist, the book provides examples of how geoGraphic fieldwork is conducted and offers analysis of the processes of ideation, composition, and dissemination of geoGraphic narratives. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Preface: constellations of urban comics 1 Introduction: enacting comic book geographies Comic book geographies in practice A geocritical reading of comic book geographies Comic book geographies in practice: sketching the geoGraphic novel Part I Assembling comics for creative interventions in urban space 2 Comics as assemblages: building urban stories in the public sphere For a ‘street geography’: drawing in public space Comics as geo-artistic collaborations Let it speak! The voice of a building Reading paths through public space 3 Drawing urban comics: ethnoGraphic strolling across ‘peripheral’ neighbourhoods Comics behind the scenes: authoring a geoGraphic narrative Travel at the centre of a comic book anthology Walk and draw, map and tell! CartoGraphic strolling in Arcella (Padua) Bridging pages and places: visual metaphors and geoGraphic chronotopes Comic book geographies beyond the frame Part II Moving comics from representation to practice 4 Graphic mobilities: mobile practices, bodies, and landscapes of movement in comics The representation of movement in comics Mobility and the geohumanities 5 Doing comics on the move: an autoethnographic account of geoGraphic fieldwork Mobile storylines along the tramway in Turku Storying memories, interviews, and encounters along the route Composing urban archives: objects and visuals as narrative triggers GeoGraphic fieldwork in practice: mobile methods, creative practices, and the researcher–cartoonist beyond the frame Index