Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics Call for Papers: Special Issue on Indian Graphic Narratives @JGNandComics

The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics has published a Call for Papers for a special issue on Indian graphic narratives. Here's the description of the Call.

The post-millennial years have witnessed significant developments in the field of popular visuality in South Asia and for India at least, a liberalised economy, advancements in digital technology, satellite television, urban beautification projects and a publishing boom have all shaped what we see, how we see it and why we see it. Within this post-millennial, economic, socio-cultural context Indian graphic narratives have prospered. Now, nearly twenty years into a sustained period of their production, there is a need to take stock of the field in order to bring together the various facets of scholarship that continue to emerge about this body of cultural production. Although the early years of the 2000s saw steady production and (in particular, domestic) circulation of Indian graphic narratives, research and scholarship has taken a little time to gain similar momentum but as the canon of creative work has grown, scholarship, particularly in the last seven to ten years has proved to be more sustained and wider in its scope of enquiry. The field now has some key academic texts with many chapters and academic papers supporting this field of interest and research. The aim of this Special Issue is to publish a selection of academic papers that reflect on and take stock of the field, exploring and presenting key themes, tropes and directions that the Indian graphic narratives scene has pursued collectively over the last 15-20 years. We are interested in examining the last twenty years of Indian graphic narratives production through the following (and related) topics with the over-arching theme of ‘reflection’ and ‘taking stock’: The post-millennial Indian publishing scene and Indian graphic narratives (global corporates, domestic, independent presses and story houses) Theoretical approaches to post-millennial Indian graphic narratives Graphic narratives of the early post-millennial years - Sarnath Banerjee, Orijit Sen, Vishwajyoti Ghosh as examples Comics collectives in India and co-created/curated anthologies of graphic narrative work The works of Appupen The works of Amruta Patil Biography-based graphic narratives Graphic non-fiction (such as the First Hand volumes of work)

More at this link.

Still Open: CFP Law, Comics, Justice: Graphic Justice Discussions 2018 @LexComica

The Graphics Justice Research Alliance CFP for its Graphic Justice Discussions 2018: Law, Comics, Justice is open until July 10, 2018. More here.

Joe Sacco at Queen Mary University, March 21, 2017, To Discuss Law and the Humanities

Via @maksdelmar:

Inaugural Queen Mary Conversation in Law and the Humanities: Joe Sacco

21 March 2017

 

Time: 6:30 - 9:00pm 
 
Venue: Peston Lecture Theatre, the Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road E1 4NS United Kingdom

The Department of Law is delighted to welcome renowned graphic novelist Joe Sacco for the inaugural Queen Mary Conversation in Law and the Humanities.
An on-stage interview with Joe Sacco will be conducted by Dr Maks Del Mar and Professor Penny Green. The aim of the new flagship series is to invite scholars and practitioners working in the arts and humanities to discuss the role of law in their work, and to thereby showcase the most cutting edge practice and research in law and the humanities.

More information at the website here.

Socio-Legal Studies Association, 2017, Newcastle University, April 5-7, 2017: Call For Papers

Via Thomas Giddens @ThomGiddens, news of

Graphic Justice

This stream invites submissions exploring the intersections of law and justice with comics, graphic fiction, and related visual media.

Critical interest in the comics medium has exploded in recent decades, and is steadily growing within the legal academy. Indeed, comics and graphic fiction—and their related visual emanations, including film, video games, and wider ‘geek culture’—are of huge and on-going significance to law, justice, and legal studies.

On a socio-cultural level, comics are historically embroiled in debates of free speech whilst today they inspire countless pop culture adaptations—from television to cinema to video games, as well as performance activities such as cosplay—and can be seen to reflect and shape popular visions of justice, morality, politics, and law.

On the level of content, from mainstream superhero narratives tackling overt issues of justice, governance and authority, to countless themes related to morality, justice, and humanity in stories within and far beyond the mainstream, comics are rich with legal material. On the level of form, the comics medium’s unique and restless blending of different media and types of representation (text, image, visuality, aesthetics, inter alia) radically opens up discourse beyond the confines of the word, enabling greater critical engagement amidst our increasingly visual age.

On the level of production, comics are a complex art-form, with multiple creators working in individual, group, commercial, and industrial contexts, raising questions of ownership and exploitation—issues exacerbated by comics’ transmedia proliferation. In short, comics and their related visual media bring rich cultural, practical, and aesthetic contexts and mediations to long-standing and emerging legal problems and settings. Broad questions framing this ‘graphic justice’ intersection might include: What are the relationships between comics and related visual media, and law—culturally, socially, formally, theoretically, jurisprudentially...? How can we use comics and related visual media in law—in practice, education, theory, research...? Can we consider comics as objects of legal regulation in their own right—raising issues of definition, ownership, consumption, value...? The crossover between law, comics, and related media is an expansive and open one. The examples above are merely indicative of possible issues and questions; the graphic justice stream welcomes submissions for papers that traverse any potential intersection between law and comics or related visual media—all broadly defined. ​

Conveners Angus Nurse, Thomas Giddens and David Yuratich

Representative John Lewis and the Graphic Novel

Representative John Lewis (D-Georgia) has won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Work for his second graphic novel, and the second volume in his autobiography, March, Book Two (published in 2015). Co-winners are Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell. The book continues Representative Lewis' memoir of his work and experiences during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Read more here:

Erin Blackmore, Remembering the Civil Rights Movement...With Comics, JSTOR Daily.

Kim Lacy Rogers, Oral History and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 75 Journal of American History 567-576 (September 1988).

A CFP for a Conference on Politics in Comics

The Comics Forum has issued a Call for Papers for its Conference to be held November 12-13, 2015 at the Leeds Central Library, Leeds (UK). The subject this year is Politics: A Conference on Comics. As part of this year’s Comics Forum conference, Applied Comics Network will lead a session on the politics of comics that communicate specific information, and the use of comics in education. For this session in particular, ACN welcomes proposals from both comics creators and comics scholars. ACN is a network for anyone who works with comics/graphic narrative and information.

More here from the Comics Forum.  

Via Nick Sousanis (on Twitter).

Exploring Legal Issues Through Comics and Graphic Novels

Thomas Giddens' new book Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law (Routledge, 2015) is now available. Here's a description of its contents from the publisher's website.

The intersections of law and contemporary culture are vital for comprehending the meaning and significance of law in today’s world. Far from being unsophisticated mass entertainment, comics and graphic fiction both imbue our contemporary culture, and are themselves imbued, with the concerns of law and justice. Accordingly, and spanning a wide variety of approaches and topics from an international array of contributors, Graphic Justice draws comics and graphic fiction into the range of critical resources available to the academic study of law. The first book to do this, Graphic Justice broadens our understanding of law and justice as part of our human world—a world that is inhabited not simply by legal concepts and institutions alone, but also by narratives, stories, fantasies, images, and other cultural articulations of human meaning. Engaging with key legal issues (including copyright, education, legal ethics, biomedical regulation, and legal personhood) and exploring critical issues in criminal justice and perspectives on international rights, law and justice—all through engagement with comics and graphic fiction—the collection showcases the vast breadth of potential that the medium holds. Graphic Justice will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in: cultural legal studies; law and the image; law, narrative and literature; law and popular culture; cultural criminology; as well as cultural and comics studies more generally.

The book includes such essays as Dr. David Keane and Dr. Jeremie Gilbert's work on how graphic novels explore human rights issues.  It's based on a conference which Dr. Giddens organized last year.

Check out Dr. Giddens' blog Graphic Justice here.

Law and Trauma in the Work of Art Spiegelman

Karen Crawley, Griffith Law School, and Honni Van Rijswijk, University of Technology, Sydney, have published Justice in the Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma in the Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman. Here is the abstract.

Scholars working at the intersection of law and trauma have often turned to literature to supplement the law’s version of justice. In this article, we consider what the unique formal properties of comics – which we refer to here as graphic novels – might bring to this pursuit, by reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1996) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). We suggest that these two works offer a critique of the underlying model of trauma upon which law relies, suggesting alternative understandings of trauma in a mode which is particularly instructive for law. Although Spiegelman organizes his treatment of trauma through specific events that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – the Holocaust and 9/11 – he represents the impact, as well as the ethical and aesthetic questions of these experiences, in ways that radically challenge the supremacy of the event by showing the ways in which the event fails to be contained.

Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Law and Trauma, Seen Through Graphic Novels

Karen Crawley, Griffith Law School, and Honni Van Rijswijk, University of Technology, Sydney, have published Justice in the Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma in the Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman. Here is the abstract.

Scholars working at the intersection of law and trauma have often turned to literature to supplement the law’s version of justice. In this article, we consider what the unique formal properties of comics – which we refer to here as graphic novels – might bring to this pursuit, by reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1996) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). We suggest that these two works offer a critique of the underlying model of trauma upon which law relies, suggesting alternative understandings of trauma in a mode which is particularly instructive for law. Although Spiegelman organizes his treatment of trauma through specific events that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – the Holocaust and 9/11 – he represents the impact, as well as the ethical and aesthetic questions of these experiences, in ways that radically challenge the supremacy of the event by showing the ways in which the event fails to be contained.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.