A collaborative methodology for using comics in research

by Lydia Wysocki

Lydia Wysocki

In 2022 the Methodspace focus is on Research<>Relevance. How do we make the research process and findings relevant to people outside of academia? Lydia Wysocki offers comics as a way to reach new readers. In addition to her Methodspace posts, learn more on her comics website: https://appliedcomicsetc.com and follow her on Twitter: @appliedcomics.

When working from home academia can be a lonely place, but when using comics as a research method it is often team work that makes the dream work.

This second blog post in my series is about a methodology for social science and humanities researchers to work together with comics creators. That methodology sets out a process to work with comics creators to explore, draft, and produce comics for use at specific points in a research project. It may be of particular use to people interested in using comics as a research method who have no interest in writing and drawing their own comic. If you’re a multitalented polymath Renaissance person, please do read on anyway – this methodology is an interesting process and a model ripe for adaptation to more artforms and mediums.

cover of Wysocki, L, Murphy, A, and Murphy, L. 2021. Applied Comics Collaborations: Ways for humanities and social science researchers to work together with comics creators

The Applied Comics Collaborations methodology provides a structure for comics creators, a researcher, and a facilitator to work together to generate a range of insights and approaches to communicating research. By emphasising a draft, this methodology is a way to explore multiple possible ways forward before committing to final artwork. Paying comics creators to share their expertise at the planning stage is a realistically incremental approach to pursuing research funding, aiming to explore multiple options before deciding on one costed way forward. Focusing on a draft is also a chance to work through complex issues of representation inherent in people-based research. Seeing one’s own research bounced back in new visual and verbal ways can help even the most critical of researchers identify potentially harmful errors in representation and inclusion, and to do so at a stage when it is possible to make changes to not only the comic but the research project of which it is a part.

Find resources you can use!

The project webpage has free resources to help you run your own version of this methodology:

• a how-to guide (in comics form)

• a folder of generic resources, including an example timetable and details of the tasks we used at key points in the project week

• snapshots and quotes from our three pilot project teams.

The following page from the how-to guide gives a flavour of the idealised and real versions of this methodology, as well as showing the joy that Adam and Lisa Murphy’s comics creation skills brought to Lydia Wysocki’s role in developing this methodology.

(page 25 of 28 of Wysocki, L, Murphy, A, and Murphy, L. 2021. Applied Comics Collaborations: Ways for humanities and social science researchers to work together with comics creators.)

Credits:

This how-to guide comic was made by Lydia Wysocki with Adam & Lisa Murphy. We’d also like to thank Carol Moxam as an advisor on this comic. The copyright of this guide belongs jointly to its creators. This guide is published with an Attribution –  NonCommercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

The Applied Comics Collaborations methodology is based on learning from the project ‘Accelerating collaborations between comics creators and researchers’, led by Lydia Wysocki with Rachael Ball, Hannah Cawardine, John Cei Douglas, Stacy Gillis, Jim Medway, Raksha Pande, Irina Richards, Hannah Sackett, Rohit Sharma, Mark Stafford, Nate Sterling (Kaimera Collective), Anja Uhren and Audrey Verma. This project was funded by ESRC IAA ABC (Economic and Social Research Council, Impact Acceleration Account, Accelerating Business Collaborations) at Newcastle University.

Reference:

Wysocki, L, Murphy, A, and Murphy, L. 2021. Applied Comics Collaborations: Ways for humanities and social science researchers to work together with comics creators. Available at: http://appliedcomicsetc.com/collaborations