Symposium: Drawing Diversity: Identity, Organizing, and Imagining in Comics and Graphic Narratives

“Drawing Diversity” seeks to highlight the research and ideas of comix scholars who research questions of power, representation, and identity in comics. The symposium hopes to engage the politics and poetics of representing the intersections of race, nationhood, gender, and sexuality, among other social locations, through the comics form. Some central questions we will explore include:

• What are the ethics and politics of visual representation amid the violent realities of white
supremacy, heteropatriarchy, imperialism and (neo)colonialism?
• How can comics represent historical traumas both past and present?
• Can the visual/verbal incite new modes of identification, empathy, and ethics in narrative?
• What possibilities for activism (or artivism) exist within comics, popular culture, and literary studies across cultures and geographies?
• How does graphic narrative (mis)represent individuals and communities?
• What is the place of graphic narrative in a diverse classroom?

Frederick Luis Aldama is University Distinguished Scholar as well as Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University where he teaches Latino and Latin American literature, comic books, TV, and film in the departments of English, Spanish/Portuguese, and Film Studies. He was honored with the 2016 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education’s Outstanding Latino/a Faculty in Higher Education award as well as a recipient of the White House Bright Spot for Higher Education Award and the Ohio Education Summit Award for his Latino High School outreach program, LASER. He is founder and co-director of The Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute.

Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center; Department of Spanish and Portuguese; Department of English; American Cultures and Global Contexts Center; Global Latinidades Project & Erickson Endowed Chair; MultiCultural Center; Literature and the Mind Initiative, and Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative