Comics as a Research Practice

Drawing Narrative Geographies Beyond the Frame

Giada Peterle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367524654
• eBook ISBN: 9781000396089
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

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.

1
INTRODUCTION

Enacting comic book geographies

DOI: 10.4324/9781003058069-1

Comics as a Research Practice: Drawing Narrative Geographies Beyond the Frame explores the doing of comics as a creative, narrative, context-based, and mobile practice for conducting research in geography and intervening in urban contexts through art-based interferences in comics form. Starting from an cross-disciplinary perspective (McCormack 2005, p. 119) and a transdisciplinary research practice, the book responds to the call for a ‘commitment to resolute experimentalism’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, p. 440) in geographical research and proposes comic book geographies as a prolific laboratory for conducting creative methodological experimentations in urban spaces. The book speaks especially to those working in the geohumanities and in urban and literary geography, and, more generally, to all those cultural geographers that are interested in experimenting with creative methods for the narrativisation of cities, maps, places, and everyday mobile practices. The book is also meant to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and speak to scholars working in the interdisciplinary fields of mobility, spatial literary, urban, cultural, and visual studies. Anthropologists exploring visual methods, sociologists, urbanists working with narrative approaches to urban contexts, art practitioners interested in exploring the possibilities and limits of research–art collaborations, and even comics authors particularly attentive to the representation of space could be equally engaged by the practice-based approach of the book. Quoting Nigel Thrift, the book is ‘concerned with thought-in-action, with presentation rather than representation’ (Thrift 1996, p. 7) and, thus, also attempts to engage with a less specialist readership, including students at different levels who would like to start practicing cross-disciplinary spatial thinking. For this reason, theoretical and methodological reasoning in the book is explained through practice-based examples and concrete case studies that show how to ideate, compose, and disseminate urban comics. Finally, through the insertion of coloured images, such as photographs taken during fieldwork and original comics pages, along with several autoethnographic and ethnofictional excerpts, readers have access to the research process from a narrative and internal perspective and are invited to engage with comics as means to activate geographical thinking. Readers of this book have an active role to play since they are asked to take part in the process of meaning-making and of assembling and disassembling urban narratives.

Comic book geographies in practice

As John D. Dewsbury et al. suggest, ‘enacting geographies’ means to propose a serial logic of the unfinished that would be able to recognise, undergo, and embrace, rather than define and explain, the ongoing, exceeding essence of the world and, therefore, the unfolding essence of research itself. This book starts with the suggestion of accepting that ‘the world is more excessive than we can theorise’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, p. 437) and invites geographers to embrace a kind of spatial thinking that focuses on processually registering experience and presenting research, rather than on steadily representing fixed thoughts:

We want to work on presenting the world, not on representing it, or explaining it. Our understanding of non-representational theory is that it is characterised by a firm belief in the actuality of representation.

(Dewsbury et al. 2002, p. 438)

In this light, representations are no longer interpreted as ‘veils, dreams, ideologies, as anything, in short, that is a covering which is laid over the ontic’ (p. 438), but rather as practices that constantly (re)present the world. Following this suggestion, recent research in comic book geography has demonstrated that even comics can be ‘taken seriously’ (p. 438). This book takes a step forward and suggests that comics have to be taken seriously not just as objects of analysis but also as creative practices to conduct geographical research through the use of disparate empirical engagements with urban comics.

Furthermore, if representations are considered ‘as performative in themselves; as doings’ (p. 438), the same especially applies to comics. In fact, the peculiar spatial structure of comics invites authors and readers into a constant spatial effort; provides them with an experience of performative movements across the space of the page; and asks them for constant assembling, disassembling, and reassembling of meanings throughout the narration. As I have highlighted in my previous work on comic book cartographies,

both the comic author, who composes the comic space by making spatial decisions, and the reader live a fragmentary cognitive and embodied spatial experience that is similar to that of searching for the way through composing and reading a map.

(Peterle 2017, p. 45)

Writing and reading comics are intrinsically spatial practices that engage geographers in immersive experiences and spatial thinking. According to Jason Dittmer’s seminal manifesto, ‘comic book visualities open geographers up to uncertainty, tangentiality, and contingency’ (2010a, p. 234), and comics should be explored from both a representational and non-representational angle. Through ‘emergent causality’, comics propose a construction of meaning that proceeds through the montage of apparently disconnected elements and unrelated parts (Dittmer 2010a, p. 235). Recalling Walter Benjamin’s constellations of meaning, comics do not compose a single mosaic or vision but rather activate an emergent, unceasing process of spatial reconfiguration and composition of meaning. Enacting comic book geographies means embracing comics as both an object and practice of research, the double perspective of the author and reader, the geographer and cartoonist, or researcher–artist. Comics as a research practice invites us to cooperate with a relational, non-linear, and plurivectorial perception of time and space; a processual understanding of representation; and a narrative conception of urban space.

Starting from these ‘tactical suggestions’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, p. 439) and understanding geographical research as a pluralistic, open-ended process of experiencing and knowing space, in this volume I suggest exploring comic book geographies from both a representational and more-than-representational viewpoint and interpreting comics as an ‘emerging field of practice’ also in geography (Kuttner et al. 2020, p. 2). Comics offer more than representations of geographical issues; they are ‘cultural artifacts, sites of literacy, means of communication, discursive events and practices, sites of imaginative interplay, and tools for literacy sponsorship’ (Kuttner et al. 2020, pp. 2–3) that permit geographers to conduct qualitative research differently. Interpreting comics as performative doings permits me to open up comic book geographies to a double perspective that will emerge throughout the empirical chapters of the book: comics as doings and the practice of doing comics. Thinking of comics as doings means recognising that they act, move, affect, and intervene in the world. Comics create connections and relationships and activate practices that have effects beyond the comics’ frame, outside the page, and in the material world. As Ben Anderson claims, there has been a ‘range of substantive and theoretical research trajectories coalesce[ing] around the proposition that representations do things – they are activities that enable, sustain, interrupt, consolidate, or otherwise (re)make forms or ways of life’ (2019, p. 1120). Given cultural geographers’ ‘concerted effort to understand the force of representations as they make, remake, and unmake worlds’ (Anderson 2019, p. 1120), this book proposes a specific focus on how the intrinsically spatial grammar of comics (Groensteen 2007) has the potential to make, remake, and unmake urban contexts. As Dydia DeLyser et al. say, geographers ‘are working, in multiple ways, with multiple methods, to find geographical praxis that may speak to a world always in the making’ (DeLyser et al. 2010, p. 14). I suggest that the doing of comics could be embraced as a prolific research practice to explore the unfolding process of building worlds through words and images.

This ability of comic narratives to act on urban spaces is especially intriguing in light of the recent (re)appearance of a so-called creative turn in geography and the declared ‘urgency’ to experiment with creative approaches and methodologies, especially within the field of the geohumanities (Eshun and Madge 2016; Hawkins 2013b; Jellis 2015). The practice of doing comics thus represents an opportunity to embrace creativity ‘as a mode of critical exploration’ (Hawkins 2013a, p. 53). Harriet Hawkins has defined ‘creative geographies’ as ‘modes of experimental “art-full” research that have creative practices at their heart’ and ‘have become increasingly vibrant of late’ (2015, pp. 262). As she further argues:

These research strategies, which see geographers working as and in collaboration with artists, creative writers and a range of other arts practitioners, re-cast geography’s interdisciplinary relationship with arts and humanities scholarship and practices and its own intradisciplinary relations.

(2015, pp. 262–263)

Following the increasing interest in art–geography contaminations, this volume explores comic book geographies from a processual, often autoethnographic perspective. In fact, theoretical reasoning emerges here through a series of empirical examples and creative graphic interventions in urban space that I realised either in collaboration with artists, art practitioners, and scholars from other disciplines, or that I drew and wrote myself.

So, why focus on comics in urban contexts? There are several reasons for these creative comics collaborations to happen in urban contexts. Comics and the city are inseparably tied and the close connection between graphic narratives and urban spaces and between the genre of the graphic novel and the metropolis has been widely recognised and explored across disciplines (Ahrens and Meteling 2010; Eisner 1985, 1996). For the purpose of my book, two very recent works analysing the relationship between comics and the urban environment were especially helpful: Benjamin Fraser’s Visible Cities, Global Comics: Urban Images and Spatial Form (2019) and Dominic Davies’ Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (2019). Both works analyse urban comics as immersed in broader geographical, spatial, economic, and social con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: constellations of urban comics
• 1 Introduction: enacting comic book geographies
• Part I Assembling comics for creative interventions in urban space
• Part II Moving comics from representation to practice
• Index