WOW! It’s been a busy spring/summer! I’ll recap a few highlights by category of activities.
Teaching:
This spring quarter was the second year of teaching my favorite group of talented graduate students in the University of Illinois at Chicago Biomedical Visualization program. This is a deep dive fourteen-week Graphic Medicine course. These students are already incredibly talented artists and scientists of anatomy and physiology. As I understand it, my job is to equip them with the tools of comics and theories of graphic medicine to enhance their practice as they prepare for their final thesis projects and emerge into the job market.
Topics we cover:
-
- The language of comics
- Researching for comics and comics as research – interviewed a BVIS student at University of Toronto and created a comic about the interview. Heavily relied on the new book Making Nonfiction Comics by Shay Mirk and Eleri Harris. Interview with one of the creators here.
- Close reading comics – here used the work of graphic journalist Josh Neufeld to analyze the medium in action.
- Educational comics in health care best practices, guest speaker, health communication specialist Gary Ashwal of Booster Shot Media.
- Memoir comics and storytelling techniques, guest speaker Elizabeth Trembley.
- Advocacy comics and graphic bioethics
- Body maps and zines
- Bringing it all together – Kid Gloves by Lucy Knisley
University of Chicago, Science Communication course – “Comics for Health and Science Communication”, co-taught with Brian Callender and María José Mompeán Mejías.. Another fantastic class, these were undergraduates majoring in various scientific fields. We even had one talented student majoring in astrophysics! Guest speakers in this course included Matteo Farinella, Whit Taylor, Nathan Gray, and Alex Thomas.
An absolute highlight of the last year has been working with Fulbright Scholar María José Mompeán Mejías. From her University of Chicago Bucksbaum-Siegler Institute for Clinical Excellence bio,
“María José Mompeán Mejías is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago and a doctoral candidate in medical humanities at the University of Alicante in Spain. With a background in translation, interpreting, and linguistics, her research explores graphic medicine, multimodal communication, and the textual and visual analysis of clinician-patient interaction. In collaboration with Dr. Brian Callender, she is conducting a study on best practices in provider-patient communication through the lens of graphic pathographies. These findings will inform the creation of an educational comic, funded by the Bucksbaum Institute, designed to support communication training for healthcare professionals.”
Her website with work-in-progress is here. We had many adventures in the months we worked together, including most of the events discussed in this post, best summarized in photos. Working with and getting to know María José and her husband Hector was absolutely a highlight of my year.
Guest artist:
Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. “The Case of the Human”
In this multidisciplinary workshop/conference, scholars submitted cases/case studies and were paired with comic artists who, through discussion, helped them think through and create large-scale visual representations (favoring comics) of their work. This was such a cool experience! I worked on two cases, one of which was an Ovid scholar focused on his time in exile. As the group talked, we organically evolved into realizing that the beats of Ovid’s exile story had parallels to the illness experience, as illness can create a kind of exile from one’s normal life. So we created two large comics that track the parallels of exile by Ovid and by illness. One of my favorite parts of the experience was that as the artist, I started the drawings, but as time went on, nearly everyone was drawing and/or coloring. The other groups also did amazing work and I am eager to be a part of this kind of experience again!
SMART Museum Zine making event – another terrific opportunity at the University of Chicago! The Smart Museum asked me to lead one of their Family Day events. Working with the exhibit of Alma Thomas’s work, straight from the Smithsonian, we decided on zine making focused on macro and micro scoping. Looking extremely closely and from a far-removed perspective. This was inspired by Alma’s love of space exploration and reflecting/being in nature. We had a blast!
Conferences:
15th annual Graphic Medicine International Collective conference, Baltimore, MD. Another inspiring and exhausting (in a good way) Graphic Medicine conference. In addition to presenting a workshop on Graphic Nursing with cherished colleagues, I tabled with my book and Gelli prints. I also was on a panel about the book Keywords, KeyImages in Graphic Medicine with my chapter co-author, Ebru Ustundag. And at the end of the conference we were thrilled to present the GMIC Awards for excellence in graphic medicine. The highlight was, as always, spending time with cherished colleagues and friends who I often only see at these conferences.
Next year, Bologna, Italy!
Podcast:
Alex Thomas of Booster Shot Media and I have been collaborating on relaunching the Graphic medicine podcast, and it’s been a terrific collaboration. We’ve interviewed a number of graphic medicine practitioners and have big plans for the future. You can check out our video feed here and the audio feed anywhere you get your podcasts. We have a few exciting interviews to be posted soon.
Our big feat this year was broadcasting live from the conference in Baltimore! We had many views, likes, and comments on Instagram which was thrilling. If it’s still up, you can watch one of our broadcast feeds here.
Next up: In August & September I will be doing another mini-residency at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. My last one was in 2023. This time events will include several workshops, classroom activities, and curating an art exhibit in their gorgeous Lied Gallery. Next post here will focus on that in a few months.
Thanks for reading!