Re-imagining care in comics: an interview with Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins

As an existential practice, predicated on human interdependencies and labour, care attains remarkable significance in sustaining the life of the ill/disabled and is an indelible part of families and healthcare. Families, medicine, and institutional caring centres (such as old age homes, hospices among others) justify their commitment to care through emotional and practical/ technical approaches towards illness/disability. COVID-19 pandemic has just made human interdependency and significance of care exceptionally visible through laying bare the inevitable physical and social vulnerabilities. However, in the contemporary neoliberal society that favour autonomy and efficiency, care is overlooked, undermined, undervalued, and often linked with vulnerability and precarity. Graphic caregiving memoirs drawn by caregivers themselves are ideal sites for re-imagining, validating, depicting and reconceptualising experiences of care. In this email interview graphic artists Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins reflect on care, the wide range of issues concerning its practice and suggest an alternative perspective towards caregiving. In Part A titled Of Comics and Care the authors respond to generic questions about their interest in comics, works, life, among others. In Part B titled What was I expecting? Compassion? Validation? The authors respond to questions related to their respective graphic narratives. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

"I AM NOT A VIRUS": COVID-19, Anti-Asian Hate, and Comics as Counternarratives.

Ever since the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, East Asians across the globe have been ostracized, othered, pathologized, and subjected to numerous anti-Asian hate crimes. Despite contemporary China's rapid modernization, the country is still perceived as an Oriental and primitive site. Taking these cues, the current article aims to investigate the Sinophobic attitudes in the wake of COVID-19 through a detailed analysis of sequential comics and cartoons by artists of East Asian descent, such as Laura Gao and Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom. Drawing theoretical insights from Alexandre White's "epidemic orientalism" and Priscilla Wald's "medicalized nativism," this essay investigates how these chosen comics function as counternarratives through first-person storytelling. In so doing, these comics, while reinstating the dignity of East Asians, also challenge and resist the naturalized methods of seeing that justify violence and dehumanization. The article further argues that Sinophobia and anti-Asian hate crimes are motivated as much by the origins of COVID-19 in China as by the political, economic, and technological variables that have shaped modern China.

Graphic Determinologisation in Heterofunctional Translation: an Analysis of the covid-19 Graphic Novel Un mundo, un desafio

Graphic novels are a relatively new text genre in the field of medicine and health sciences. However, they have proven extremely useful for disseminating scientific knowledge and for non-expert users, who are demanding a more active role in healthcare contexts though more effective doctor-patient communication, to gain access to medical information via healthcare literacy and patient inclusion. In this paper, we analyse the translation of the Handbook for the Prevention and Treatment of covid-19 into a graphic novel titled One World, One Fight! from the perspective of heterofunctional translation and its determinologisation using images in the Spanish translation.

Community Translation as a Tool in Graphic Medicine

In recent decades, graphic medicine has become an important tool in science outreach and is used by health professionals to bring specialist knowledge to the lay public. Similarly, translation and interpreting play a key role in adapting highly specialised texts to a wider audience using a series of tools, from determinologisation to intergeneric translation and transcreation. At the confluence between these two branches of knowledge lies community translation, a discipline that focuses on empowering citizens and works to translate and adapt scientific texts to formats including comics in conjunction with graphic medicine. In this paper, we explore the process of translating and adapting a scientific paper to create a comic for patients about cancer and covid-19.

Critique of Data Visualisation, Graphic Medicine and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Data sets were plentifully used in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although they were utilized for documentation, policy formulation, course correction, and research among others, data sets relentlessly reduced human beings to mere numbers and glossed over the affective and emotional experiences which characterize our lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarrelling with such decontextualized, depersonalized, and hegemonic impacts of data, graphic medicine while not entirely dismissive of the performative authority of data, criticizes and supplements data only to arrive at a complex model of data. Using close reading of comic panels created by Andy Warner, Sarah Firth, and Randall Munroe, the present article demonstrates how graphic medicine imagines different ways of engaging data through enfolding the social/individual and structures of feeling to convey the embodied nature of our existence. Put differently, graphic medicine rematerializes and reclaims the individuals from datasets through a process which we call "redrawing." Redrawing is a textual practice and strategic engagement with the authority of visual/verbal discourses and its attendant technologies through rhetorical operations of irony, satire and genre blending among others. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to humanize, contextualize, and sensitively present data so as to convey the collective, entangled and affective nature of our existence. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of QScience Connect is the property of Hamad bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU Press) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Re-imagining care in comics: an interview with Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins

As an existential practice, predicated on human interdependencies and labour, care attains remarkable significance in sustaining the life of the ill/disabled and is an indelible part of families and healthcare. Families, medicine, and institutional caring centres (such as old age homes, hospices among others) justify their commitment to care through emotional and practical/ technical approaches towards illness/disability. COVID-19 pandemic has just made human interdependency and significance of care exceptionally visible through laying bare the inevitable physical and social vulnerabilities. However, in the contemporary neoliberal society that favour autonomy and efficiency, care is overlooked, undermined, undervalued, and often linked with vulnerability and precarity. Graphic caregiving memoirs drawn by caregivers themselves are ideal sites for re-imagining, validating, depicting and reconceptualising experiences of care. In this email interview graphic artists Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins reflect on care, the wide range of issues concerning its practice and suggest an alternative perspective towards caregiving. In Part A titled Of Comics and Care the authors respond to generic questions about their interest in comics, works, life, among others. In Part B titled What was I expecting? Compassion? Validation? The authors respond to questions related to their respective graphic narratives. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

'The time is out of joint': temporality, COVID-19 and graphic medicine.

This article aims to theorise the human experiences of time during the lockdown (in the first phase of the pandemic) and the COVID-19 pandemic through the verbo-visual exposition of graphic medicine that combines the medium of comics and healthcare. The event of the pandemic has not only bifurcated our perception of time in terms of a 'before' and an 'after' but also complicated our awareness and experience of time. Put differently, an epochal transformation caused by pandemics has shifted our temporal experience from the calendar/clock time to a queer time situated outside of formal time-related constructions. The pandemic also implies a dismantling and rearranging of the fundamental structures of time within which human beings interacted with the world. Such a discontinuity in the linear trajectory of chronological time engenders an epistemic and ontological reconfiguration of the very sense of time itself. Through a phenomenological close reading of various sequential comics, single panelled images and graphic medical narratives, this article investigates how visual narratives in the form of comics communicate the passage of time. Categorically speaking, pandemic graphic narratives on time draw attention to stagnation, repetition, acceleration, loss of referentiality and the queerness (strangeness) of pandemic time. The article argues that a shift in the perception of time precipitates an altered spatio-temporal awareness that informs postpandemic discourses and power structures.

Spit bubbles, speech bubbles, and COVID-19: creating comics in the age of post-infection India.

Positioning this essay at intersection of comics studies, visual literacy studies, and information literacy studies, we investigate an interdisciplinary liaison between crisis in the age of COVID-19 and its awareness campaign through Indian comics. With a focus on awareness programme, Indian artists designed comics to demonstrate their vital position in social engagement through this visual medium. Following impending threats and growing concerns, people of all ages glued themselves to social media, newspapers, and television to keep them updated on the impact of COVID-19. Indian comics e.g. Nagraj Strikes: The Attack of Coronaman (2020), Priya's Mask (2020), Kids, Vaayu, and Corona: Who Wins the Fight? (2020), and 'Be aware of Droplets & Bubbles!!' (2020) aimed to help children comprehend the precautionary steps to be taken to save themselves from getting infected with Coronavirus. While the first three comics showcase spit-bubbles primarily as the source of COVID-19, infusing the content with a tinge of superhero fantasy, 'Be aware of Droplets & Bubbles!!' (2020) unveils the microbiological evolution and mutation of the pathogen in comics format. The objective of the article is to show how Indian comics on COVID-19 can be an advantageous communicative medium to nurture knowledge and edutainment in post-infection India.

Ngutulu Kagwero (agents of change): study design of a participatory comic pilot study on sexual violence prevention and post-rape clinical care with refugee youth in a humanitarian setting in Uganda.

With over 1.4 million refugees, Uganda is Sub-Saharan Africa's largest refugee-hosting nation. Bidi Bidi, Uganda's largest refugee settlement, hosts over 230,000 residents. There is a dearth of evidence-based sexual violence prevention and post-rape clinical care interventions in low- and middle-income humanitarian contexts tailored for refugee youth. Graphic medicine refers to juxtaposing images and narratives, often through using comics, to convey health promotion messaging. Comics can offer youth-friendly, low-cost, scalable approaches for sexual violence prevention and care. Yet there is limited empirical evaluation of comic interventions for sexual violence prevention and post-rape clinical care. This paper details the study design used to develop and pilot test a participatory comic intervention focused on sexual violence prevention through increasing bystander practices, reducing sexual violence stigma, and increasing post exposure prophylaxis (PEP) knowledge with youth aged 16-24 and healthcare providers in Bidi Bidi. Participants took part in a single-session peer-facilitated workshop that explored social, sexual, and psychological dimensions of sexual violence, bystander interventions, and post-rape clinical care. In the workshop, participants completed a participatory comic book based on narratives from qualitative data conducted with refugee youth sexual violence survivors. This pilot study employed a one-group pre-test/post-test design to assess feasibility outcomes and preliminary evidence of the intervention's efficacy. Challenges included community lockdowns due to COVID-19 which resulted in study implementation delays, political instability, and attrition of participants during follow-up surveys. Lessons learned included the important role of youth facilitation in youth-centred interventions and the promise of participatory comics for youth and healthcare provider engagement for developing solutions and reducing stigma regarding SGBV. The Ngutulu Kagwero (Agents of change) project produced a contextually and age-tailored comic intervention that can be implemented in future fully powered randomized controlled trials to determine effectiveness in advancing sexual violence prevention and care with youth in humanitarian contexts.

Using comics and curiosity to drive pandemic research on a national scale.

An independent online Public Health survey regarding the COVID-19 pandemic was conducted during an Alert Level 4 lockdown, the highest possible, in New Zealand. An illustrated and curiosity-driven public engagement campaign was designed to advertise survey participation, and performance compared with a standard approach using randomised controlled A/B Split tests. The 'Caretoon' approach featured comic illustrations, appealed to goodwill and was intended to pique curiosity. This linked to an illustrated version of the survey which, upon completion, gave a personalised comic summary showing how respondent's answers compared with national averages. The standard ad and survey were not illustrated with comics, and did not provide a personalised comic summary on completion. Both approaches were cost- and time-effective, together resulting in 18,788 responses over six days. The Caretoon approach outperformed the standard approach in terms of the number of people reached, engaged, survey link clicks, gender and ethnic diversity amongst respondents, and cost-effectiveness of advertising. This came at the expense of a small reduction in the proportion of completed surveys and male respondents. The research evidences objective value of public engagement activity, comics and curiosity as tools which can support Public Health research on a national scale.

The role of comics in public health communication during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the globe, evolving containment measures have created an unprecedented need for rapid and effective science communication that is able to engage the public in behavioural change on a mass scale. Public health bodies, governments, and media outlets have turned to comics in this time of need and found a natural and capable medium for responding to the challenge. Comics have been used as a vehicle to present science in graphic narratives, harnessing the power of visuals, text, and storytelling in an engaging format. This perspective paper explores the emerging role and research supporting comics as a public health tool during the COVID-19 pandemic.