What do comics want? Drawing lived experience for critical consciousness
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article presents a reflection on drawing autobiographical comics as a method of engagement with critical theory and the potential for illustration education. I suggest that drawing and sharing autobiographical comics might be used to engage illustration students to think critically about identity, representation and power. To illustrate this approach, I present my own practice-based research project that used comics-making as a method to make sense of queer ways of being in childhood – ways of being that may have been discounted, ignored or suppressed within a dominant heteronormative culture. The intention was to evoke a playful mode of drawing that might queer my illustration practice while braiding childhood memory with critical theory. As educators, to get our illustration students to think critically, we might start with the students’ own lived experience and enlist the potency of comics to visualize their stories as resilient and instructive counternarratives. I suggest that drawing comics might be reframed as a performative space for playing with our stories to understand the historical and socio-economic forces that shape our lives and identities. Through making and sharing autobiographical comics, we engage in a transgressional strategy that uses story and drawing as transformative tools for Freirean critical consciousness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it