life beyond apocalyptic imaginaries

Communicating climate change with comics

Drawing on her experience with creative research translation, Gemma Sou - researcher at the University of Manchester - discusses how comics provide several possibilities to communicate climate change using geographical analysis and anti-essentialist representations. Comics can be deployed as a multi-modal method that encourages researchers to use thick description to communicate embodied, intangible, and hidden experiences of life with climate change that are difficult to capture in other ways. Comics are also a powerful way for authors to visualize how life with climate change is multi-temporal and to capture diverse images of still-possible and alternative climate futures that move beyond apocalyptic imaginaries to inform debates about the geographies of hope as they relate to climate change.

Finally, comics can enhance the participatory nature of research and facilitate a move to a more 'desire-based' research framework that emphasizes character-driven and anti-essentialist narratives. The work reported in this paper should be of broad interest among geographers engaging in geohumanities and climate change researchers experimenting with creative methods to narrativize and communicate human experiences of climate change. The author's intentions are to move beyond disciplinary boundaries; speak to scholars working in the interdisciplinary fields of climate change, comics studies, climate change communication, and visual studies; and invite more engagement with this mode of creative research translation.

You can read the full paper here!