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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Drawing and Talking a Way In Together: Graphic Ethnography for Youth as Generative and Intergenerational Entangled Relations

presenters

    Susan Frohlick

    Nationality: Canada

    Residence: Canada

    University of British Columbia, Okanagan

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

Graphic ethnography is blossoming as a form of ethnographic representation and storytelling to reach non-anthropology audiences. Given the “creative splash of possibilities” that it elicits, Theodossopoulos (2022) suggests, “What makes graphic ethnography so exciting is its unpredictable lens, its proclivity to unsettle, its resistance to accept narrowly circumscribed representational formats.” Graphic ethnography also gives rise to new relationships between an illustrator and the non-drawing anthropologist. Unless one requires draws (as some anthropologists do), one needs to work with someone who does. While anthropology has long considered other people who we are entangled with, e.g., interlocutors and field assistants, to be co-producers of knowledge, such entanglements often inform, rather than concretely direct, the representational process. Leading a team creating a graphic ethnography about African youths’ settlement experiences in Winnipeg, Canada, I often feel lost. Based on previous fieldwork where youth were peer researchers paired with university researchers, I aim to continue a youth-focus. A young person is the illustrator, we have a youth advisory group, and youth are the intended audience. In the midst of the creative process now, I reflect on the ways that drawing, and then talking about the drawing, has become a way into the emergent story. The illustrator, a young Ethiopian first generation immigrant, me, an older white settler of European descent, and a community researcher who came to Canada from Kenya through a refugee program—we are in “entangled relations” that move the story along, line by line, sketch by sketch, conversation by conversation. I suggest that at the core of the potentialities to be unpredictable and to disquiet and push boundaries of conventional text-based ethnographic accounts are these inter-generational, cross-racial, and anthropologist-community collaborations necessitated by graphic ethnography, not only as public scholarship but also as “wayfinding” (Pigg 2022).

Keywords:

graphic ethnography;