Comic Ethnographies: Exploring graphic narratives of social justice research

Comic Ethnographies: Graphic Narratives and Social Justice Research

16 November 2022, 4-6pm (UK time)

This online panel discussion brings together researchers, writers and comic artists who have used the comic format to explore and present questions of social justice and community action to an audience beyond academia. Invited speakers will discuss their recent and current projects, working collaboratively and incorporating design into research.

For further details and to register please click here.

A YouTube link will be sent to participants in advance of the event.

The event is generously supported by the CSICD and a British Academy small research grant.

Confirmed speakers:

James Walker, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Nottingham Trent University

James specialises in large scale collaborative digital projects. These include Dawn of the Unread, a graphic novel exploring Nottingham's literary history, Whatever People Say I Am, a series of comics challenging stereotypes, and Changing Minds, part of a campaign to raise awareness of misogyny. Current projects include The D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre and The Loneliness of the Lockdown Runner on Instagram. Writing is just an excuse to talk to people. He teaches Creative Writing at NTU.

Hugh Goldring and Nicole Burton, Petroglyph Studios

Hugh Goldring and Nicole Burton are a writer and artist team based in Ottawa, Canada, in the traditional territories of the Algonquin people. They have been adapting scholarship into comics since 2014. Together they have produced comics on a broad cross-section of social issues ranging from policing to refugees. Their most recent publication is Wonder Drug: LSD in the Land of the Living Skies, a history of psychedelic psychotherapy in midcentury Saskatchewan, available through Between the Lines Press in Canada and AK Press in the United States. They are always looking for new opportunities to collaborate. You can see their work here.

Edmund Trueman, Junk Comix and Alejandra Pajares

Edmund Trueman has been creating and self-publishing underground comics for the last decade. He has written about social topics ranging from the refugee crisis to the squatting movement, as well as engaging with those movements first-hand. In 2021 he co-created the comic Dunkirk Jungle with Alejandra Pajares, based on interviews with residents of the Dunkirk refugee camp. In 2022 his first long-form graphic novel was published – Postcards from Congo. Also in 2022, he completed his first comic in collaboration with Petroglyph Studios – Entre Ici et Là-Bas.

Alejandra Pajares graduated in Anthropology and International Relations with an MA in Conflict Studies and Human Rights at the Utrecht University. She has conducted anthropological research on urban conflict and gender in Turkish Kurdistan, and identity formation at Greek and French refugee camps. Together with Edmund Trueman, she co-wrote the comic Dunkirk Jungle (2021) on the everyday life and hardships of migrants staying at a refugee camp in Dunkirk, Northern France. Currently, she is working on a new research project in Barcelona, collecting people’s stories on the effects of gentrification at a neighborhood on the fringes of the city. 

Henri Michaux: adventures of a reluctant psychedelic psychonaut - Talk with Oliver Davis, University of Warwick

 

'Henri Michaux: adventures of a reluctant psychedelic psychonaut'

Professor Oliver Davis, University of Warwick

26 October 2022, 2-3pm 

Online Teams link

 

Still from Images du monde visionnaire (Michaux and Duvivier, 1964). 

 

Looking back from the perspective of the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ today, with its promise of new therapies to treat some of the world’s most troublesome mental health problems, this paper presents some of my recent research on the extraordinarily rich cultural production around drugs by Modernist poet, writer, critic and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899–1984). For about a decade, from the mid-1950s, the otherwise famously sober Michaux wrote five books, included within which were dozens of drawings, and made one half-hour film, charting his adventures as a reluctant psychonaut, principally with the psychedelic mescaline, but also with psilocybin, cannabis and LSD. A leading cultural historian of drugs has rightly described this as one of the world’s richest cultural explorations of mescaline (Jay 2019): it is far more extensive, textually complex, and aesthetically demanding for its audience than Aldous Huxley’s better known near-contemporaneous works on psychedelics in English.  

 

In this second of a series of four papers I will develop my analysis of Michaux’s acutely sensitive phenomenological analysis of drugs’ effects on the brain by focusing especially on the following areas, where I believe Michaux can make a substantial contribution to ongoing debates in the psychedelic renaissance today: (i) the role of psychedelics in enhancing ‘creativity’; (ii) the qualitative difference to the nature of the experience depending on whether a resistant-reluctant mental attitude (‘set’) or a more ‘open’ approach of ‘going with the flow’ is adopted during the session and the wider personal, political and social implications of either; (iii) the aesthetico-political significance of psychedelic experience; (iv) his acerbic critical appraisal, as a prolific traveller with a profound interest in the cultures of East Asia and Central America, of the naïve Orientalism endemic in US psychedelic counterculture at the time, which can in turn inform heated debates today about the appropriation of indigenous cultures’ understanding of psychedelics by Western biomedicine. I will aim to show that Michaux’s work on drugs has much to contribute to cultural understanding of psychedelics today and accordingly that this unjustly neglected classic of French – and global – drug culture deserves to be far better known. 

 

Oliver Davis is Professor of French Studies at Warwick University, Executive Editor of Modern & Contemporary France and Co-Editor of a new series of articles on ‘the Psychedelic Humanities’ for Frontiers in Psychology. He has published widely on the work of Jacques Rancière and most recently, in a co-authored book with queer theorist Tim Dean, on the cultural aversion to sex: Hatred of Sex (Nebraska, 2022). Other work has examined techniques of policing and imprisonment, in France and more widely, and he is collaborating at present with Sophie Fuggle on two co-authored articles about the French penal colony. The main focus of his current research is the politics of psychedelics, both in the psychedelic renaissance today and in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s. 

 

All Welcome.

21st Century Artaud: the ‘virtual’ and new media - Jay Murphy

 

21^st Century Artaud: the ‘virtual’ and new media - Jay Murphy

Wednesday 19 October, 2-3pm 

Online Teams link 

 

© Georges Pastier, 1946-48 

 

A spate of new books and translations are creating a new evaluation of Antonin Artaud (d. 1948) as not only a seminal mid-20^th century artist in his own right, but also as one with a heretofore unrealized contribution to the 21^st (Barber 2019, 2020-22; Valente, 2020; Bradnock 2021; Murphy 2016, 2021)  This is in league with analogous arguments for the renewed relevance of those Artaud often regarded as his peer group – Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud (Lübecker 2022), Gerard de Nerval (Valente 2022), as well as Marcel Duchamp as a prefigurative thinker of the posthuman (Rosenberg 2022). Much as Nikolaj Lübecker’s study 21^st Century Symbolism maintains the notions of subjectivity that emerge from Mallarmé or Rimbaud make eminent sense in a 21^st century ecology, Artaud maintains a fierce presence in his insistence on the ‘virtual’ body or “life plane” (Artaud 2004, 212), of neurology and the brain as fields of struggle and contestation. Uncannily, Artaud in 1933 predicted the development of Virtual Reality (VR) from devices that would fit in one’s pocket, yet foresaw that it could only have a “limited number of vibrations” that would be “incapable of surpassing itself” (Artaud 2004, 380). Artaud’s call for a “new body” (Artaud XIII 1974, 118), in an era of widespread body augmentation, alteration, and cyborgian mutation, appears less ‘mad’ and delusional than an essential insight. Numerous artists have created work that must indeed be navigated via a ‘virtual’ self (Varela 1999; Varela et al 2017), following perhaps Dada and early Surrealism in the proposition that full embodiment requires occasional out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences. These essential questions from Artaud, who was writing about virtuality and virtual planes as early as 1925, are these debatable roles of representation and representational processes and what can possibly constitute a subversion of them in an inexorable digital sensorium. 

  

Jay Murphy is a writer and author of New Media and the Artaud Effect (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and Artaud’s Metamorphosis (Pavement Books, 2016). He has thrice been a finalist for Sundance Screenwriting Labs and his collaborative Internet projects have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival. He has contributed to CTheory, Art Journal, Deleuze Studies, Parallax, Culture Machine, Frieze, MAP, Afterimage, Parkett, Art in America, Metropolis, and Third Text, among other publications. In 2009, 2011, and 2014, he organised exhibitions and programs of film and moving image work from the Middle East and North Africa for venues in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow; in 2011-12 the film series "First Person"​ for Inverleith House/Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh; and in 2008 gallery exhibitions in New York and Edinburgh. He is also completing a creative nonfiction web project on the Middle East and other environs called Baraya/Perimeter. 

 

All Welcome.