I helped create Graphic Possibilities, a graduate student 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 explored 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.
As part of Graphic Possibilities, I’ve helped create and organize several past and ongoing comics initiatives, including: