COMICS AND/AS RESISTANCE
A conference at the University of Oxford and online
Wednesday 21 - Friday 23 June 2023
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. This year, the team of Graduate Convenors – Laura Bergin, Cailee Davis and Carolin Gluchowski – and the Lead Convenor Dr Alexandra Lloyd, organised an interdisciplinary and international conference on ‘Comics and/as Resistance’. 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. 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. The conference called for scholars and creators to explore the poetics and politics of resistance within comics and graphic literature. They were asked to consider how stories and histories of resistance are mediated through comics; how resisters and their agency are depicted; how comics creators contest dominant narratives and formal expectations and constraints; and how ‘resistance’ is conceived of and enacted within the comics medium.
The Call for Papers attracted over 100 abstracts from a range of academics and comics creators from around the world. Over forty speakers were invited to present at the conference, either in person in Oxford, or online. The conference began on Wednesday 21 June 2023 with a live-streamed discussion on the role of comics in academia: ‘“Why Do We Study Comics?” A Round-Table Discussion on Teaching, Researching, and Learning from Comics’ at Magdalen College, Oxford. The conference continued on Thursday 22 June 2023 with a welcome by the organisers, followed by a series of parallel panels. Topics included the climate crisis, political resistance, depictions of war and displaced peoples, and health activism. The first day concluded with a drawing workshop where delegates were invited to collaborate on the creation of comics inspired by resistance. The second day featured another set of rich and fascinating parallel panels and concluded with a panel on the curation of comics and readers’ (often subversive) interactions with them. The conference provoked much discussion of the role of comics in the academy, its potential as a form, and medium-specific opportunities and issues. There were moving and thought-provoking contributions on the potential of this form to have a positive impact on the world.
The conference was generously supported by TORCH and by the St Edmund Hall Academic Enhancement Fund. The Organisers would like to thank the team at TORCH and the Taylor Institution Library, all those who helped to organise and document the conference, and the speakers and audience members.
