Comics as pedagogy: On studying illness in a pandemic

Abstract

Comics and graphic narratives have become a key component of my pedagogy, both in terms of the materials I teach and the activities I have students do. Most of my courses take up topics related to my research into the conjunction illness-thought-activism in history. In my work, I am interested in illness and disability in action in particular times and places. Thus, I have found myself drawn to the growing field of graphic medicine, and its diverse community of practitioners, as inspiration for my research and teaching. During the pandemic, graphic medicine has become even more central to what and how I teach. In this essay, I discuss how I used comics as pedagogy in classes on illness and illness politics that I taught during the first year of the pandemic. I begin by briefly addressing how I framed the problem of studying illness in a pandemic before discussing two assignments that show graphic medicine in action as a pedagogical tool: the first, an asynchronous online group discussion exercise in which students practiced annotation as a method of visual analysis, and the second, a documenting COVID-19 final project assignment for which students could document in comics form a pandemic experience.