Call for Papers
‘Comics and/as Resistance’ Conference
Thursday 22 June and Friday 23 June 2023
In person at the University of Oxford (UK) and online
This conference seeks to bring together a wide range of scholars and creators to explore the poetics and politics of resistance within comics and graphic literature. Comics is a highly diverse and versatile medium, able to speak across boundaries, languages, temporalities, and cultures. This kind of formal flexibility makes it a particularly potent form for mediating resistance and resistance narratives. We understand resistance as a theme in a broad sense, from acts of political defiance to cultural practices that challenge perceived hegemonies. Resistance can also be a useful concept with which to examine the way that comics as a medium engages with categorizations, ideas about cultural legitimacy, and dominant forms of storytelling and historical representation. How are stories and histories of resistance mediated through comics? How are resisters and their agency depicted? How do comics creators contest dominant narratives and formal expectations and constraints? How is ‘resistance’ conceived of and enacted within the comics medium?
We invite papers that engage with these questions, and with resistance more broadly as a theme and/or as a mode of critical enquiry. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
· Depictions and/or mediations of historical acts of resistance, resistance networks, and the role of comics within cultural memory
· Representations of contemporary resistance movements
· Examples of comics being used to challenge dominant/hegemonic discourses and/or contribute to political discourses of resistance
· Formal conceptions of resistance within comics, for example the use of sound as a means of ‘resisting’ the silence of the medium; forms of hybridity than could be understood as resistance between text and image; resistance through the use of frames, the gutter, and text
· Histories of publication, distribution, and reception, particularly within transnational and global contexts
· Comics and/in translation
· Issues of genre, such as tensions between graphic fiction, memoir, and non-fiction
· The role of comics within pedagogies of resistance
· Comics as a collaborative form of resistance
· Comics and/as adaptation
· Graphic journalism
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers to be delivered in English.
Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) and a short biographical note (max. 75 words) to Dr Alex Lloyd (Lead Convenor, Oxford Comics Network) and the conference organising committee (Laura Bergin, Cailee Davis, Carolin Gluchowski, Luise Morawetz), using this form: https://forms.office.com/e/B6rsF2Fka5.
The deadline for submissions is 31 January 2023. Notifications will be made by 15 February 2023. A publication of selected papers is planned.
Please direct any queries to comics@torch.ox.ac.uk.
The Oxford Comics Network at the University of Oxford (UK) brings together students, academics, and practitioners from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to explore the power, politics, and potential of the comics form.
Find out more about the Oxford Comics Network here.
