Tag: graphic medicine

#IGNCC20 Workshop Materials: Ambiguity, Empathy and Narrative Co-Design: The User Experience of Reading Dementia Care Comic

Ernesto Priego

IGNCC20 conference banner

Our synchronous workshop at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference was hosted synchronously yesterday Thursday 2 July 2020, Session T7, 16:00hrs BST in the (online) conference Room 2.. We have included all the relevant information below.

The session was hosted live via the conference Blackboard Collaborate videoconferencing platform. It was free and required no previous registration. The Twitter hashtags for our session were  #IGNCC20 #woripr.

About 33 international participants attended and the discussion via video and voice and as text via the chat was very lively and interesting. Thank you everyone who attended and for your feedback and to the chairs and organisers for their very hard work.

The materials can be downloaded and cited via figshare as:

Priego, Ernesto; Grennan, Simon; Wilkins, Peter (2020)  Workshop: Ambiguity, Empathy and Narrative Co-Design: The User Experience of Reading Dementia Care Comic. University of the Arts London. Conference contribution. https://doi.org/10.25441/arts.12579731.v1
The workshop concluded by giving some ‘homework’ to those participants wishing to try it out. You can find it in the slides we shared on figshare (link above). No need to have attended the synchronous session to try it out!

Full conference information including programme: https://internationalgraphicnovelandcomicsconference.com/igncc-2020/

 

In ACM Interactions Magazine: Comics as COVID-19 Response: Visualising the Experience of Video-conferencing

Ernesto Priego
Art by Peter Wilkins; Editing by Ernesto Priego (2020)
Art by Peter Wilkins; Editing by Ernesto Priego (2020) https://doi.org/10.25383/city.12348959.v1

I am very happy to share that my article with Peter Wilkins, “Comics as COVID-19 Response: Visualising the Experience of Video-conferencing with Ageing Relatives” was published yesterday in ACM Interactions Magazine at https://interactions.acm.org/blog/view/comics-as-covid-19-response-visualizing-the-experience-of-videoconferencing.

ACM Interactions is published bi-monthly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest educational and scientific computing society in the world. Interactions is the flagship magazine for the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), with a global circulation that includes all SIGCHI members. We are honoured our article (and comic!) will also appear in the print version of the magazine.

We worked on this article in response to the magazine’s Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic invitation.

I’d like to extend my gratitude to Alex Taylor, Daniela Rosner, Mikael Wiberg and John Stanik.

The comic we discuss in the article can be viewed, downloaded, shared and cited from figshare as:

Wilkins, Peter; Priego, Ernesto (2020): A Comic Visualising the Experience of Video-conferencing with Aging Parents During the COVID-19 Pandemic. City, University of London. Figure. https://doi.org/10.25383/city.12348959.v1

The Lockdown Chronicles 39: Bernard

Ernesto Priego

This is just a thumbnail. To go to the comic strip, click on the blog post URL.Click on the image below to read the comic strip in full size. Sources and references on this post under the comic strip below.

Bernard checks Twitter.
Click on image for full size.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His play The Doctor’s Dilemma was first staged in 1906. It is a problem play about the moral dilemmas created by limited medical resources, and the conflicts between the demands of private medicine as a business and a vocation [Wikipedia entry].

Source texts: Gabriel Scally @GabrielScally (9 June 2020, 8:52 PM BST). #COVID19 drive-in test centres run by Deloitte; contract tracing run by Serco, helped by Capita. I think George Bernard Shaw had something to say on the matter in 1911. #coronavirus. Tweet. Available from https://twitter.com/GabrielScally/status/1270443754613325824 [Accessed 9 June 2020]. Shaw, G. (1909) The Doctor’s Dilemma: Preface on Doctors, Project Gutenberg. Available via https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5069/5069-h/5069-h.htm [Accessed 9 June 2020]. Additional references below.

Source image: Photograph of Bernard Shaw writing in notebook at time of first production of his play “Pygmalion”, 1914. LIFE Photo Archive on Google, © Time Inc. Original for personal non-commercial use only.  Photo reused here under educational fair dealing via Wikimedia Commons. This comic strip CC-BY-NC-SA.

References

Gabriel Scally @GabrielScally (9 June 2020, 8:52 PM BST). #COVID19 drive-in test centres run by Deloitte; contract tracing run by Serco, helped by Capita. I think George Bernard Shaw had something to say on the matter in 1911. #coronavirus. Tweet. Available from https://twitter.com/GabrielScally/status/1270443754613325824 [Accessed 9 June 2020].

Shaw, G. (1909) The Doctor’s Dilemma: Preface on Doctors, Project Gutenberg. Available via https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5069/5069-h/5069-h.htm [Accessed 9 June 2020].

Taylor, D. (6 June 2020) “Serco wins Covid-19 test-and-trace contract despite £1m fine”. The Guardian. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/serco-wins-covid-19-test-and-trace-contract-despite-1m-fine [Accessed 9 June 2020]

Garside, J. (23 April 2020) “Hospitals sound alarm over privately run virus test centre at Surrey theme park”. The Guardian. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/hospitals-sound-alarm-over-privately-run-test-centre-in-surrey [Accessed 9 June 2020]

English Heritage. Blue Plaques. Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950). Available at https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/george-bernard-shaw/ [Accessed 9 June 2020]

Photograph of Bernard Shaw writing in notebook at time of first production of his play “Pygmalion”, 1914. LIFE Photo Archive on Google, © Time Inc. Original for personal non-commercial use only.  Photo reused here under educational fair dealing via Wikimedia Commons, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Bernard_Shaw_notebook.jpg  [Accessed 9 June 2020]

 

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The Lockdown Chronicles is a series of periodical comic strips made at night (in candlelight!) adapting and reusing openly-licensed or public domain items from online digital collections. Publication and tweetage are scheduled in advance. Historical sources are adapted and updated for the current pandemic; please refer to each strip’s references on each post for further context.  Catch up with the series at https://epriego.blog/tag/the-lockdown-chronicles/.

The Lockdown Chronicles 34: Susan

Ernesto Priego

This is just a thumbnail. To go to the comic strip, click on the blog post URL.

Click on the image below to read the comic strip in full size. Sources and references on this post under the comic strip below.

Susan chips in.
Click on image for full size.

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, cancer, AIDS and illness, human rights, and other topics [Wikipedia entry].

Text sources: Text sources: speech balloon in panel 1, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, May 8, 2020, as quoted by Human Rights Watch (12 May 2020); captions in panels 1-3: Human Rights Watch (12 May 2020) Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide, available via https://www.hrw.org/; speech balloons in panels 2-4: Sontag, Susan (1989). AIDS and Its Metaphors. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Source image: photograph of Susan Sontag in her home in 1979, CC-BY Lynn Gilbert, via Wikimedia Commons. © Lynn Gilbert. This comic strip CC-BY-NC-SA

References

Human Rights Watch (12 May 2020) Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide, available via https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Sontag, S. (1989) AIDS and Its Metaphors. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Scanned version available via Monoskop at https://monoskop.org/File:Susan_Sontag_AIDS_and_Its_Metaphors_1989.pdf [PDF]. [Accessed 28 May 2020]

Gilbert, L. (1979).Photograph of Susan Sontag in her home. CC-BY Lynn Gilbert, via Wikimedia Commons at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Susan_Sontag_1979_%C2%A9Lynn_Gilbert.jpg  © Lynn Gilbert. [Accessed 28 May 2020]

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The Lockdown Chronicles is a series of periodical comic strips made at night (in candlelight!) adapting and reusing openly-licensed or public domain items from online digital collections. Publication and tweetage are scheduled in advance. Historical sources are adapted and updated for the current pandemic; please refer to each strip’s references on each post for further context.  Catch up with the series at https://epriego.blog/tag/the-lockdown-chronicles/.

 

Using narrative to convey the experience of dementia care-giving: I Know How This Ends: Stories of Dementia Care

Ernesto Priego

I Know How This Ends cover (2020)

Today I announced the release of a new output in the Parables of Care series:  I Know How This Ends: Stories of Dementia Care (2020).  This is the second volume in a series that started with Parables of Care: Creative Responses to Dementia Care (2017).

Drawn by Peter Wilkins and Melissa Martins, designed by Simon Grennan and edited by Yours Truly,  I Know How This Ends is a 16-page comic book resulting from collaborative narrative research and co-design sessions with participants.

The book presents, in synthesised form, stories crafted from narrative data collected via interviews with professional caregivers, educators, and staff at Douglas College in Vancouver, Canada, who have cared for relatives and people with dementia in hospital.

[Personal warning: where Parables of Care was a tender, sympathetic and even funny collection of practical strategies,  I Know How This Ends may prove a tougher, darker read. As Peter Wilkins put it in a message to the team, “all of the interviews were about incredible weight, abandonment and suffering”. A someone whose late father had dementia I can relate to such feelings around the care-giving experience, and I Know How This Ends indeed does attempt to represent and interpret the experiences of the care-givers the project team talked to. We believe there is no way to make up the stark reality of dementia, its difficulty and emotional intensity. It would be unethical to do so. Some readers may be disappointed not to find more hopeful optimism in the book. In I Know How This Ends stories are being told and shared, and feeling and emotion, however difficult, are being channeled and processed. I see in this act of storytelling a significant source of hope. Personally I hope the book helps communicate the problematic and painful intensity of the experience of care-giving, saying to those that might be struggling that they are not alone].

The previous volume employed the form of the parable to tell individual stories based in real-life cases as told by carers. As the foreword explains, this new comic is structured like a classical Greek tragedy – with a prologue, three episodes, and an epilogue –because the stories the team worked with had the elements of tragedy: inevitability, stratagems to avoid fate that merely bring it on, and catharsis of negative emotions.

The intention of the book is to show the importance of feeling in care-giving, the professional aspects of which are sometimes at odds with the family systems aspect of dementia.

As we state in the foreword, by 2030, 82 million people are anticipated to have dementia and 152 million by 2050. With this project we aim to continue making a contribution to widen the dissemination of one of the key challenges of our time, following user-centred design and narrative research design methods.

  I Know How This Ends: Stories of Dementia Care  can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from

As this is a publication made for print please note the PDF file is 130MB; mobile users might prefer to download it and view it from a laptop or desktop.

The free print version of the comic will be available soon and you can request free copies via this form.

My gratitude to all the members of team, as well as other colleagues, friends and family members whose direct and indirect support throughout the development of this phase of the project was essential and is sincerely appreciated.

For a list of credits and thank you’s please look inside the book. ;-)

We look forward to hearing what you think.

Podcasting for Research Dissemination: Launching the City Interaction Lab Podcast

Ernesto Priego
Panel by Peter Wilkins, from I Know How This Ends
Panel by Peter Wilkins, from I Know How This Ends

City Interaction Lab Podcast – Episode 1 – Discussing Graphic Medicine and Co-Designed Comics 

Earlier this week we launched the City Interaction Lab Podcast with an inaugural episode where we talk about graphic medicine with Dr Simon Grennan (University of Chester) and Peter Wilkins (Douglas College, Vancouver Canada).

Brought to you by City Interaction Lab and the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London, the City Interaction Lab Podcast will be a series of thought-provoking design-focused audio episodes featuring interviews and opinions hosted by Stuart Scott and myself.

In this inaugural episode we discuss work co-designing the comics ‘Parables of Care‘ and ‘I Know How This Ends’ centred on dementia care. These complementary issues shine  light on those living with dementia and their carers.

We are aware of the issues with audio levels in this episode; we’ll do better next time!

Our gratitude to Professor Martin Eve for allowing us to use his track The Learning Experience as our podcast theme track.

The original audio file of the podcast has also been deposited in City Figshare.

Citation:

Priego, Ernesto; Scott, Stuart; Wilkins, Peter; Grennan, Simon (2019): City Interaction Lab Podcast – Episode 1 – Discussing Graphic Medicine and Co-Designed Comics – Parables of Care. City, University of London. Media. https://doi.org/10.25383/city.11347799.v1

More on Parables of Care

Parables of Care explores the potential of comics to enhance the impact of dementia care research.

The 16-page publication presents in comics form true stories of creative responses to dementia care, as told by carers, adapted from a group of over 100 case studies available at http://carenshare.city.ac.uk.

Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from

If you work in a library, hospital, GP practice or care home- or care for someone with dementia in the UK, you can order a free copy of Parables of Care here: in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

From the original post at https://blogs.city.ac.uk/hcidcomicsgames/2019/12/09/launching-the-interaction-lab-podcast/

On the Aesthetic Education of Caregivers: Presentation Report from #GM2019 at the Parables of Care blog

Ernesto Priego

This post was originally published on the Parables of Care project blog and the images are hosted there. Copying and pasting here for self-archiving purposes.

The City, University of London and Douglas College, Canada research team collaborating on comics and creativity for healthcare were present at the Graphic Medicine 2019 international conference in Brighton, UK, hosted by the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, 11-13 July 2019.

The title of this fully multidisciplinary conference this year was Queerying Graphic Medicine – Paradigms, Power and Practices.

A full report of the conference is outside the remit of this blog post. However, you can catch up with the conference hashtag on Twitter- to make that easier I created a searchable archive of the #GM2019 tweets here. There’s some excellent photos, sketches, comics, links and information that give a rich collective view of what went on.

Abi Roper (City)  Marie-Pier Caron (Douglas), Ruhina Rana (Douglas), Peter Wilkins (Douglas) and myself (City) presented in a panel in the Paradigms Panel at Room M2 on Friday 12 July 2019, from 4 to 5:30 pm. The title of the session was “On the Aesthetic Education of Caregivers. The Specificities of Form and Genre in Comics about Dementia Care”.

The presentation slides have been deposited on figshare and can be downloaded under a CC-By license as

Priego, E., Wilkins, P., Roper, A., Caron, M., et al. (2019) On the Aesthetic Education of Caregivers. The Specificities of Form and Genre in Comics about Dementia Care. Presentation. [Online]. Available from: doi: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8863448. [Accessed: 16 July 2019].

The audience included health care professionals, academics and artists also working on dementia, aphasia and mental care, with the conversation between audience and presenters extending beyond the Q&A and the session allocated time and offering a valuable networking opportunity to continuing or initiating further collaborations. We were all very grateful for the attentive and engaged audience who attended our session, and for their important questions and feedback.

The team also distributed free copies of both Parables of Care and the INCA Project‘s MakeWrite poetry booklet (in a limited and numbered edition handmade by Abi Roper specially for the conference). This happened both at the panel session itself and throughout the whole conference thanks to the generosity of the Waterstones table (Richard- if you read this, thank you!).

Table at conference panel room
Conference Waterstones table

The Brighton conference was a unique opportunity for the team to work together (for once not mediated by computers nor geographically separated by the 7,573 km distance between Vancouver and London, UK), to get to know each other better and strengthen our research ties. Though Simon Grennan was unfortunately unable to make it due to work commitments, he was in touch with us throughout and before the conference had ended he had already shared with us the proofs for the Parables of Care Spanish translation, which we will release before the end of the Summer. (We missed you, Simon!)

Priego, Roper, Caron, Rana, Wilkins at GM2019
Left to Right: Priego, Roper, Caron, Rana, Wilkins

The conference provided plenty of further evidence that our previous and ongoing work fits within a larger, fully international and multidisciplinary, dynamic and exciting network of individuals and organisations focused on advancing the case for the use of comics and other multimodal storytelling media within healthcare. I think it is fair to say that all of us had the most fantastic, nurturing, fun and thought-provoking time.

Thank you very much to all the GM2019 organisers, as well as all our fellow presenters and attendees, for an incredible conference.

The GM2019 conference organisers announced the Graphic Medicine will return to Toronto next year. See you in Toronto for GM2020 maybe?

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Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from

If you work in a library, hospital, GP practice or care home- or care for someone with dementia in the UK, you can order a free copy of Parables of Care here: in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

Parables of Care at the Graphic Medicine 2019 Conference, Brighton, UK

Ernesto Priego

graphic medicine conference 2019 bannerI am pleased to (slightly belatedly) announce on this blog that our multidisciplinary panel discussing Parables of Care will feature in the programme of the Graphic Medicine 2019 international conference in Brighton, UK.

Our panel will feature team members from the UK and Canada components of the Parables of Care project.

The title of the conference this year is Queerying Graphic Medicine – Paradigms, Power and Practices and will take place 11-13 July 2019 in Brighton, UK.

 

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Parabeln der Pflege: new translation of Parables of Care makes comic about dementia care available to German-speaking audiences

Ernesto Priego
Cover of the German version of Parables of Care
Cover of the German version of Parables of Care

A new translation of Parables of Care makes comic about creative responses to dementia care available to German-speaking audiences

 

Download Parables of Care (original English version) from City Research Online, City, University of London: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18245/

Download Parabeln der Pflege. Kreative Reaktionen in der Demenzpflege, von Pflegenden erzählt [Parables of Care German version] from City Research Online, City, University of London: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/21252/

This new German translation is also available to download from ChesterRep, University of Chester: https://chesterrep.openrepository.com/handle/10034/621804

Parables of Care. Creative Responses to Dementia Care, As Told by Carers is a research-based comic book originally published in English in October 2017.

Parables of Care has now been released in German translation, translated by Dr Andrea Hacker, from the University of Bern, Switzerland.

About working on the German translation, Dr Hacker said:

“I wanted to share Parables of Care not only with my family and the wonderful carers that help us but with a wider German-speaking audience: Alzheimer, dementia – these affect hundreds of thousands of families in the world regardless of language. Widely sharing our experiences of what works will give everyone a chance to make the best of the affliction – patients and families alike.”

[Read our Q&A with Andrea here].

The comic book was created by Dr Simon Grennan, from the Department of Art and Design, University of Chester, UK; Dr Ernesto Priego, from the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, UK; and Dr Peter Wilkins from Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.

The short comic book includes 14 informative and touching stories, drawn by Simon Grennan with Christopher Sperandio, which were adapted from more than 100 case studies of real-life dementia care situations described by a range of carers. These case studies are available at http://carenshare.city.ac.uk/

The small international team looked to expand the accessibility of this archive of carers’ stories and found that by creating short graphic art stories they could portray the emotional power of these situations. Each story is only four panels and just one page long.

Unlike clinical descriptions, this form enhances the affective aspects of each story, putting the reader at the centre of situations that often verge on incomprehensibility, but which are all resolved. In this respect, each story is universalised and becomes a parable.

The book is available open access to dementia carers and the general public as part of ongoing engagement, training and development programmes at City, University of London, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and The Faculty of Health Sciences at Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.

About the Translator

Dr Andrea Hacker is an editor, translator and open science professional who lives in Switzerland where she works at the University of Bern. She has previously lived and worked in the US, Russia, Ireland and Germany. She was mentored in literary translation during her graduate studies at UCLA by Michael Henry Heim.

Download Parables of Care (original English version) from City Research Online, City, University of London: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18245/

Download Parabeln der Pflege. Kreative Reaktionen in der Demenzpflege, von Pflegenden erzählt [Parables of Care German version] from City Research Online, City, University of London: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/21252/

Q&A with Andrea Hacker on her Parables of Care translation: https://blogs.city.ac.uk/parablesofcare/2019/01/24/parabeln-der-pflege-a-qa-with-parables-of-care-translator-andrea-hacker/

For more information, please visit: https://blogs.city.ac.uk/parablesofcare/

Press enquiries contact: John Stevenson, Senior Communications Officer, City, University of London

This post was originally published on the Parables of Care blog at https://blogs.city.ac.uk/parablesofcare/2019/01/24/parabeln-der-flege-parables-of-care-german-translation-release/

Presenting at HCID Open Day 2018: On Comics and Collaborative Art Practice as Human-Computer Interaction Methodology

Ernesto Priego

The HCID Open Day 2018 is a mini conference on Friday 4th May run by the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design (HCID) at City, University of London.

The theme for this year will be ‘Beyond the Screen’ and will focus on designing non screen based interactions, exploring technology that has made the jump from science fiction into reality and how UX thinking can be used for more than just interfaces.

I will present at the HCID Open Day 2018 as part of the knowledge exchange and impact activities around the Parables of Care project. My presentation is titled ‘Meaningful Patterns: Comics and Collaborative Art Practice as HCI Research.’

Recent research has explored the use of collaborative art practice as a Human-Computer Interaction methodology (Kang et al 2014 and 2018; Benford et al 2013; Brynjarsdyttir et al 2013). In this talk I will describe how the Parables of Care project is employing collaborative comics-making as a user-centred methodology as a means to collect and disseminate data, reflect, design and propose strategies for dementia care.

I worked in partnership with Dr Simon Grennan of the University of Chester, Dr Peter Wilkins of Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada, an NHS Trust, and colleagues from HCID, leading the team to produce Parables of Care, that uses comics as a medium to evoke the kind of de-structured and re-structured experience of time that is akin to dementia, to illness, ageing and caring.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hcid-open-day-2018-beyond-the-screen-tickets-44666147650

Hashtags: ;

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Parables of Care is a project of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, The University of Chester, UK, and Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.

Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18245/.

If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

CFP: Comics and Medicine: The Ways We Work (August 16-18, 2018, Vermont)

Ernesto Priego1 Comment

Call for Papers: Comics and Medicine: The Ways We Work

August 16-18, 2018; White River Junction, Vermont

Via Dr Ian Williams, Graphic Medicine

 

This year’s Comics and Medicine Conference invites participants to share and reflect upon how graphic medicine works.

In the context of health and its relationship to comics, “work” can refer to a number of activities: the work of medical and related professionals; the functioning of our bodies and minds; the creation or study of artistic and educational materials; the study of the archive or images/texts; work with reader communities; and the organization of collaborative community health efforts. The spaces in which “work” takes place provide another point of reflection: public healthcare centers, classrooms, home studios, private clinics, libraries, and bedsides.

In this relatively new interdisciplinary field, we hope to document and refine—from our various perspectives and experiences—the territory where cartooning and health care intersect.

We invite the submission of a wide variety of abstracts focusing on health, medicine, and comics in any form (e.g. graphic novels and memoir, comic strips, manga, mini comics, webcomics) that examine or showcase topics including, but not limited to:

 • the use of comics and cartooning for clinical interventions and teaching

• navigating institutional headwinds

• addressing time constraints to creative work

• professional development and engagement with graphic medicine

• access to funding sources

• establishing productive collaborative relationships

• planning and completing graphic medicine projects

• engaging communities of care

• work in the context of disability justice and advocacy

• representing the ‘work’ of bodies with relation to diagnosis and treatment

• unseen labor in treatment and care

• spaces of creative production

• creative labor and the tools of graphic medicine

• outcome and efficacy research

 

Presentation Formats – please read closely as these descriptions have changed.

  • Lightning talks: These 5-minute presentations should provide an engaging and concentrated synopsis of new, ongoing, or completed scholarly, creative, or professional work in Graphic Medicine. This format is designed with the promotion of sustained conversation in mind. 
  • Oral presentations: These 15-20 minute presentations are largely for collaborative,interdisciplinary, or other work that requires and engages a longer presentation format.
  • Panel discussions: These 90-minute interviews or presentations by a panel of speakers are meant to address a single topic from a variety of perspectives.
  • Workshops: These 90-minute, hands-on, activity-driven sessions are for participants who wish to obtain particular skills with regard to comics. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
  • drawing for health 101
  • accessing personal stories
  • comics and storytelling
  • mini-comic tutorial

Proposal abstracts should not exceed 300 words and may be submitted in Word or PDF format. Please include the following information in this order:

• author(s)
• affiliation
• email address
• phone number
• title of abstract
• body of abstract
• sample images or web links to work being discussed (if applicable)
• presentation format preference (see options above)
• equipment needed (e.g. AV projection, whiteboard, easel, etc.)

Proposals should be submitted by January 30, 2018 to: graphic.medicine.conference@gmail.com

Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by the week of March 15. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice of presentation format, we will attempt to honor preferences, and we will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals.

Please note: Presenters are responsible for costs associated with their session (e.g. handouts and supplies) and personal expenses (travel, hotel, and registration fees). All presenters must register for the conference. Discounted rates and some limited scholarships will be available for students, artists, and others in need.

Via Dr Ian Williams, Graphic Medicine