Kategori: Calls Conferences

The founding- and managing editors of SANEjournal: sequential art narrative in education seek critical, evaluative, reflective works from those engaged in the making, preserving, teaching, and studying of comics through the creation of comics studies programs, the stewardship of comics libraries and comics collections within libraries, and the establishing of comics studies-associated journals.

We seek pieces that address the history, evolution, and even devolution or dissolvement of such entities.

Essentially, what is the biology, the evolution, the story of your program, collection, or journal? How does your creation or the creation under your current or previous care reflect a situatedness in its field and the ontological, teleological, and epistemologies surrounding it, both in relation to current exigencies but in relation to the past as well?
What has worked to keep your artifact thriving?
What did not work?
What processes, people, and supports were in place – or not in place – to facilitate success or failure?
What happens or happened to you when a program, collection, or journal fail/ed?  
What are the essential qualities needed for such projects to initialize? To grow? To sustain? To come to a close?
Can the process of success and failure within these three domains best be illuminated through a particular – or particular set – of critical lenses?
What truths need to be told? What keeps the truths associated with the types of reflections we seek from being told forthrightly?
What issues, in your estimation, continue to go unresolved regarding the proliferation of existing and future programs of study, collections, and journals within comics studies?

Methodological approaches to addressing these questions are acceptable for consideration, as well as critical and reflective approaches.  

Example essays might have titles such as “The Making and Breaking of a Comics Studies Major: The Story of Comics at Middle-Ground State University, 1999-2010” “Preserving (and Persevering) Against All Odds as the Oddball Special Collection,” “Maintaining an Open-Access Comics Studies Journal that is Actually Open: Resisting the Appeal of Commerce and Profit,” “The History of —-,” or “An Examination of the Life of a Comics Studies Program through the Ecological Lens: 7 Principles

SANE Journal  https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/

Kind regards,
Richard Graham
Associate Professor – Chair, Teaching and Learning PartnershipsCourtesy Professor- Department of English

Malmö University and The Swedish Comics Association invites you to:
The Comics Archive Symposium 2022
Thursday 13th and Friday 14th of October
Malmoe, Sweden.

The field of comics research is expanding, but with that also comes an increasing need for archives that preserve this artform and can offer access not only to printed matter but also behind-the-scenes material – e.g. manuscripts, original artwork, correspondence, advertising and merchandise. These kinds of ancillary materials are essential to deepen our understanding of the art form and for comics research to develop, grow and mature.

There is a movement of comics centered archives being established globally right now, and this symposium will gather people from academia, archivists, collectors and others interested in the work of preserving and making comics-related artefacts accessible to researchers. The purpose of the symposium is to share knowledge of how this work can be developed, to discuss different solutions and to build international networks.

We therefor invite all interested in comics archives (in any sense) to take part of this symposium. If you wish to give a presentation (max 20 minutes) of own experiences of working with comics archives (as an organizer or as a user), please submit an abstract (250 words) no later than September 18th. No fees! Just mail us if you want to participate.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Karen Green, Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University – Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Philippe Capart, manager of the library/publishing house La Crypte Tonique in central Bruxelles and host of Club Bimbo, a platform for material and immaterial exchanges around visual narrative.

The Symposium is organized by Malmö University Comics Hub and the Swedish Comics Association. It will last for two days, from Thursday the 13th to Friday the 14th of October, and will include presentations and panel debates, as well as visits to The Comics Archive, situated in Malmö City Archives.

Venues: Malmö University and Malmö City Archives
To participate: Please mail either Gunnar or Fredrik.

Contact info:
Gunnar Krantz: gunnar.krantz@mau.se
Fredrik Strömberg: sekventiellt@me.com

Framing the Past in Comics June 16-18, 2023

The objective of HistorioGRAPHICS: Framing the Past in Comics is essentially three-fold: First, we seek to review and expand comics studies’ approaches to historiography and representations of the past in comics. Second, we aim to bring together the fields of history and comics studies more closely to deepen our understanding of visual representations not only as primary sources but also as a format of historiography. What does the fragmented mediality of comics offer to the representation of history? How do comics criticize and contextualize historical sources and historiographical practices? What futures do comics have in store for representing the past? Thirdly we emphasize the transnational approach to this topic, in the stories told as well as in the research about them, with a particular emphasis on the transatlantic perspectives.
Contributions may choose to engage with themes that may include but are not limited to:

• Holocaust comics and memory culture
• Indigenous histories and their graphic narrative representations
• The (long) Civil Rights Movement in the United States and graphic narratives of protest
• Histories of the Americas and the Global South in Comics
• Representation of historical crises as well as personal and collective trauma
• Comics in the classroom / the classroom and the public eye: politics and censorship
• Ideologies of historical representation in comics
• Institutions, political education, and (individual) activism
• Comics and/as Public History
• History in autobiographical comics, graphic memoir, and comics journalism
• Theories and methodologies of analyzing historical representations in comics

We are happy to cooperate with the Bavarian American Academy and the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor). Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Dr. Hillary L. Chute (Northeastern University, United States)
As of the current planning stage, the conference will be held in person at the Amerikahaus Munich. The availability of travel reimbursements for active participants remains pending, subject to a grant application for additional funding currently underway.
We invite proposals for individual research papers (20 min.) as well as entire panels (3 papers). Moreover, we also welcome more open and innovative formats of presentation.
Submissions (preferably as one PDF document) should include:

• The title of your paper (and panel, if applicable)
• Your name and affiliation
• Summary of content (max. 300 words, excl. references)
• Short biography (max. 150 words)

Please send your proposal no later than September 30, 2022 to both organizers
Charlotte.Lerg@lmu.de and Johannes.Schmid@uni-flensburg.de
Feel free to contact us with any further questions.

Link: https://www.temporal-communities.de/events/conference-lateral-solidarities.html

Too often, “global literature” has been synonymous with texts that make themselves legible to normative Western reading. Whether texts that originate from the West and circulate globally, those that enter the Western consciousness via translation into European languages, or those that engage with the preoccupations of the West (e.g. the veil and religious extremism in the Middle East; poverty and war in Africa; violence and narcotraffic in Latin America), what has been considered “worldly” in literary studies has not embodied the diversity and multifariousness of literary practices around the world.

For comics, this is true in an even more pivotal way. Even if their ‘value’ as an artistic medium is no longer questioned in both reading and academic communities, they have, in a very similar way to literature, also been largely limited to normative Western reading, and circulated under circumscribed conditions, with the prominent exception of Japanese comic art. As comics’ multimodal language requires acts of showing, seeing, and being seen as well as the setting of lines, frames, and angles, every hegemonic act of reading means a repressing of a medium that is, in fact, predestined to challenge our habits of looking at the world.

By approaching comics via a Global South methodology in our conference, we hope to more fully exemplify the rich world of comics coming from non-Western locales and authors. Generally speaking, we think about the Global South as characterizing work that creates lateral solidarities via culture, economics, art, politics, etc. between peoples marginalized by global capitalism. These solidarities can be explicit via comparison of work from multiple geographies, but we also believe that one can study a single locale or comic via a Global South methodology – that comparison is not the only way to create solidarity. While recognizing that the nation is a powerful unit, we think about Global South work as largely eschewing the nation in favor of smaller and larger units, such as the linguistic, tribal, oceanic, etc. In less academic terms, we are interested in analyzing comics from non-Western locales using approaches that do not rely on Western frameworks to create value and insight. This is not a wholesale rejection of the West, but decentering it as a legitimizing normative part of comic studies seems to us as a prerequisite for valuing Global South comics on their own terms.

Thursday, 2 June 2022, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin

16:00 – 22:00     Artists Soirée

16:00 – 16:15      Introduction

16:15 – 17:00      Nacha Vollenweider: 

Neo/Colonial Relations and Transnational Migration Routes in Notas al pie and Volver

17:00 – 17:45      Deena Mohamed: 

Right to Left: Arabic Comics in Self-Translation

B r e a k

18:00 – 18:45      Lea Hübner: 

Translating South American Comics

18:45 – 19:30      Powerpaola: 

Love, Friendship, Collectives – and Comics 

B r e a k

19:45 – 20:45      Round-Table 

20:45                     Catering

Friday, 3 June 2022, Freie Universität Berlin

10:00 – 22:00     Academic Part

10:00 – 10:15      Introduction 

10:15 – 11:00      Nina Mickwitz (London): 

​​Provocative Alignment: Advocacy and Fantasy in the Ghanaian comic Lake of Tears (Kobe Ofei and Setor Fiadzigbey, 2017)

11:00 – 11:45      Haya Alfarhan (London): 

”He was knowing”: Handala and Implicated Acts of Looking in Naji Al-Ali’s Political Cartoons

B r e a k

12:00 – 12:45      Sandra Federici (Bologna): 

A Sociological Approach to Francophone African Comics (1978–2016)

12:45 – 13:30      Janek Scholz (Köln): 

Nation Building in and through Comics. Examples from Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique

L u n c h

15:00 – 15:45      Lina Ghaibeh (Beirut): 

The New Generation: Arab Comics Today

15:45 – 16:30      Amadeo Gandolfo/Pablo Turnes (Buenos Aires/Berlin): 

With 10 Cartoonists I Can Make a Gnarly Stew: Re-Writing Anthologies in the 21st Century

B r e a k

16:45 – 17:30      Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (Cambridge): 

A Queer Utopia in the Brazilian-Japanese Diaspora: Taís Koshino’s Ainda ontem (2017) 

17:30 – 18:15     Anne Brüske (Regensburg/Heidelberg): ‘Da(ny) Goes Graphic‘: Cultural Positionings beyond the ‘Global South’ in Dany Laferrière’s Graphic Novels [online]

19:00 – 19:30      Final Discussion

————————————————————————————————–

Freie Universität Berlin

EXC 2020 Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective

Research Area 4 ”Literary Currencies”

they are to happen on site / in German but will be available via zoom, too!

die Vortragsreihe ”Comics und Bildung. Herausforderungen und Chancen im 21. Jahrhundert” findet im Sommersemester in Präsenz an vier Terminen an der Universität Hamburg statt. 

Die Comic-Vorstellung am 14.6. findet in Kooperation mit dem Comickolloquium Nord statt und wird auch digital über zoom zugänglich sein: https://www.zfw.uni-hamburg.de/oeffentliche-vortraege/programm-sose/12-comics-und-bildung.html

26.04.2022 
Sachcomics – Vom Nischenprodukt für Comicfans zum anerkannten Sachtext 
Prof. Dr. Heike Elisabeth Jüngst, Fakultät für Angewandte Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften, Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften Würzburg-Schweinfurt

10.05.2022 
‚Man merkt die Absicht und ist verstimmt‘. Comics in der historisch-politischen Bildung
PD Dr. Jeannette van Laak, Institut für Geschichte, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

14.06.2022
Money Matters. Entstehung und Vorstellung eines Comic Essays über Finanzen und Geld
Prof. Dr. Miriam Beblo, Fakultät für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Universität Hamburg / Pauline Cremer, Illustratorin und Grafik Designerin, Berlin / Dr. Julia Schneider, Comic Essayistin, Berlin
-in Kooperation mit dem Comickolloquium Nord –

05.07.2022
Welche Lesekompetenzen schult der Comic eigentlich? Zum Spannungsverhältnis zwischen „comics literacy“ und „visual literacy“
PD Dr. Markus Oppolzer, Fachbereich Anglistik & Amerikanistik, Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg

Zeit und Ort: Dienstags 18-20 Uhr, Fakultät für Erziehungswissenschaft, Von-Melle-Park 8, Raum 207

https://www.zfw.uni-hamburg.de/oeffentliche-vortraege/programm-sose/12-comics-und-bildung.html

There will be an online-conference on ”Adventure Narratives in Popular Images and Texts” from 12.-14. May. It is organised by the DFG Research Unit “Philology of Adventure” (FOR 2568)

Registration: adventure-narratives@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
The zoom-link for the conference will be mailed to all participants shortly before the conference starts : )

Nomination Deadline: March 25, 2022

The Comics Studies Society (CSS) recognizes outstanding contributions to the study of comic art with five annual prizes: the CSS Article Prize, the Hillary Chute Award for Best Graduate Student Paper, the Gilbert Seldes Prize for Public Scholarship, the Charles Hatfield Book Prize, and the CSS Prize for Edited Book Collections.

The CSS defines comic art as the category of artistic production that incorporates all forms of cartooning, sequential art, and graphic narrative. This includes, but is not limited to, the following forms: comic strips, comic books, papers, and magazines; albums, graphic novels, and other graphic books; webcomics and other electronic formats; single-panel cartoons, including editorial and gag cartoons; caricature; animation; and other related forms and traditions.

The CSS is currently soliciting nominations for all five prizes, which will be awarded at the 5th Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society (July 28^th-30^th, 2022). Winners will receive a $300 cash award and a plaque. Please see the CSS Website for conference details.

• Nominations for the CSS prizes may be historical, biographical, critical, analytical, pedagogical, and/or bibliographical in focus.
• Nominations should draw on original research, acknowledge and advance existing scholarship where relevant, and include appropriate documentation and citation.
• Reprints of or excerpts from previously published works are not eligible for prizes.
• Each piece of scholarship may only be nominated once across all categories of the CSS Prizes, and individuals nominated for a CSS Prize may only have one piece of scholarship competing in each category. However, nominees may compete simultaneously in multiple categories per awards cycle.
• While individuals nominated for all CSS Prizes do not need to be members, only members can nominate scholars for the CSS Prizes. Please visit the CSS’s Membership Page to join the CSS.

For more information regarding the eligibility of CSS Executive Board Members and information on past winners of the CSS Prizes, please see the CSS Website.

Frequency and time period: Prizes are awarded by the CSS at its annual conference for first-time publications (not reprints or revised editions) or (concerning the Chute only) unpublished work occurring during the previous calendar year. For example, the 2022 prizes will cover publications and presentations © 2021

Nomination process: Peer nominations and self-nominations are welcomed. Nomination letters are due March 25, 2022. The letter of nomination may take the form of an email and should do the following:

• Identify the work’s complete title, author(s) name(s), publisher, and original copyright date.
• Include means of access to a complete digital copy of the work (such as a PDF or ebook, a link to a paywall-free article or media text, media file, etc.) that members of the CSS Prize Committee can access as needed.

Nominations and inquiries should be sent by email to the CSS Awards Coordinator, Biz Nijdam, at comicssociety.awards@gmail.com.

Judging and awarding process: Nominees for each prize will be reviewed by an Awards Subcommittee of not less than three members of the Comics Studies Society, which is approved by the CSS Executive Board and includes the Awards Coordinator and/or the Awards Subcommittee Chair. Prize winners will be notified approximately two months prior to the annual conference and announcements of their award will be published on the CSS website and in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society.– 
Dr. Elizabeth ”Biz” Nijdam  PhD (She, Her, Hers)
Lecturer, Dept. of Central, Eastern, & Northern European Studies
The University of British Columbia | Vancouver Campus | Musqueam Traditional Territory
919-1873 East Mall | Vancouver BC | V6T 1Z1 Canada | Phone 778 697 6294biz.nijdam@ubc.ca | elizabeth.nijdam@gmail.com | @bizabeth

A special issue of Scritture migranti seeks to explore the representation of migration narratives in the comics medium.

The current production of comics dealing with the theme of migration is blooming. Graphic memoirs, autobiographies, pieces of comics journalism, and ethno-graphic novels – just to mention a few genres – have drawn great attention to the past and contemporary international migrant experiences. Such a large and thriving production suggests reflecting on the role of comics as a specific medium to tell migration phenomena and encourages a further exploration on how new knowledge on migration can circulate through comics. Recent studies have approached migration from different perspectives, such as remembrance and portraying of the immigrant experience (Serrano 2021), postcolonialism (McKinney 2021), life narratives and memories (Nabizadeh 2019), traumatic pasts (Davies and Rifkind 2020), aspects of emotions (Humphrey 2017), politics and aesthetics (Earle 2020; Nabizadeh 2014), topographies (Rifkind 2017), and braided geographies (Davies 2019).

We are thus interested in a broad range of contributions to further explore the intersection between comics and migration and expand our understanding of how comics raise awareness of pressing migration issues. We therefore invite paper proposals from different disciplinary backgrounds that engage on how causes, mechanisms, and dynamics of migration are represented in comics form. To enrich our collective understanding of how comics work to shape our knowledge of migration, we suggest that the proposals consider the intersection of migration and comics from three main perspectives:

● regarding themes, discussing how migration narratives are conveyed in comics form;
● concerning knowledge production, investigating how comics are (co-)created, their material collected, and the result assembled, and the challenges associated with these processes;
● focusing on reception, taking into account the didactic use of comics dealing with migration, the ways comics are (and can be) used as a tool to disseminate academic research about migration, and the effects comics about migration (may) have on policy-making.

We invite contributions that explore the representation(s) of migration narratives mostly, but not exclusively, in contemporary works from different comics traditions and cultural backgrounds. Themes may include (but are not limited to):

● advocacy, activism strategies, and empowerment
● autobiographical and biographical comics
● minorities and new communities
● politics and ethics of representation
● participatory practices
● socio-cultural anthropology and ethnography
● comics journalism
● comics as propaganda

The deadline for the submission of a 300 word abstract and a short author note (100-150 words) is February 28, 2022. Contributions will be 40,000 characters maximum including spaces, notes and bibliography, and can be submitted in English, French, or Italian. Authors may include up to three images, whose copyright clearance must be obtained by the date of publication of the special issue. Editorial guidelines (with a reference template) and additional practical and stylistic information will be communicated upon acceptance of proposals.

Publication timeline:
Abstracts deadline: February 28, 2022
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2022
Submission deadline: July 15, 2022
Peer review: by September 15, 2022
Delivery of final version of articles: November 1, 2022

Please address all enquiries to the editors crossingdrawnborders@gmail.com

The special issue editorial board:
Dr. Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Universiteit Gent
Prof. Natalie Dupré, KU Leuven
Prof. Inge Lanslots, KU Leuven
Alessia Mangiavillano, PhD Candidate, Coventry University

Call for Abstracts

Panel at the 15th World Congress of Semiotics,
»Semiotics in the Lifeworld«, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2022,
https://www.semioticsworld.com

Convened by Prof. Dr. Stephan Packard, University of Cologne, Germany, 
packard@uni-koeln.de

Please submit your abstract directly to Prof. Packard by **March 31st**. 
Paper abstracts should include: Name/Affiliation/e-mail of 
participant(s), Title, Abstract (200-250 words) and Keywords (up to 5).

Keywords: representational correspondence, ideology, cartoon, 
caricature, comic.

Caricature and cartoon – depictions of bodies and spaces that are reduced to few exaggerated, simple contours – are fundamentally historical phenomena, their functions situated in the lifeworld of the cultures that employ them. But research into cartoonish artforms and genres has rarely engaged with the cultural and historical diversity of the cartoon, wrongly taking the aesthetics of the modern European caricature for granted.

This panel invites discussion into the vast and varied cultural and historical array of cartoonised aesthetics, while narrowly focusing analysis on its most striking semiotic dimensions – those connected to the principle that Gregory Currie described as representational correspondence (2010): »for a given representational work, only certain features of the representation serve to represent features of the things represented«. Understood in this narratological approach as a license or accommodation for representation, the negotiable validity of some of the semiotic resources offered in a cartoonish picture invites debate and critique from pragmatic, ethical, and political points of view. Are stereotypical anamorphoses such as an enlarged nose, sharpened teeth, or exaggerated bosoms mere traditional and comical schemata without further reference, or do they denigrate, emphasize, connote, and reproduce hegemonic relations?

So far, even the most obvious connections to the traditions of European anti-semitic and colonial racist gazes have rarely been systematically analyzed (cf. Gray 2004), and deeper considerations of gender and class have been mostly focused on some of the most recent popular artforms (cf. e.g. Nolan 2008, Madrid 2016) and have yet to realize the analytical and explicatory potential of a dedicated semiotic study. The ideologies nested in the semiotic third space (Packard 2006, 2016; Wilde 2020) afforded between the reference and the exaggeration of the cartoon deserve greater and semiotically precise scrutiny.