Stories from the mirror: Supervising students’ graphic memoirs

Abstract

This article considers the journeys of three design students who produced graphic memoirs as a component of their postgraduate theses. Following a preliminary consideration of the nature of the graphic memoir as a form of artistic inquiry, the article discusses unique challenges to thesis supervision that the creation of such texts can pose, including the scale and complexity of the undertaking, the emotional cost to the candidate, and wider ethical concerns surrounding the representation of the self and others.