EthnoGRAPHIC: An Interview

Abstract

The interview focuses on the book series EthnoGRAPHIC (University of Toronto Press) and the graphic novel Lissa. A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship and Revolution, the first book of the series. Four points arise from the interview with authors Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye, and with the filmmaker Francesco Dragone, who documented their research process. First, the problem of funding multimedia and innovative research projects, aimed to find new ways of communicating social research. Second, the question to what extent such projects are recognized and legitimated within the Academia. Third, the audience potentially interested in reading (ethno)graphic novels and, relatedly, their usability in teaching social sciences. Finally, the concerns and practicalities in putting together different narrative forms. This effort of combining several ways of representing social reality, also concerns the organization of the research itself as well as conducting fieldwork and the capability of thinking “graphically” from scratch instead of adapting textual data collected during the research.

Keywords

• graphic novels
• collaborative ethnography
• research process
• medical anthropology
• teaching anthropology