CBR NOW!

This past week we put together the first ever (!!) comics-based research conference, CBR NOW! at the University of Vermont, sponsored by a generous grant from the New England Humanities Consortium. While Professor Luis Vivanco did most of the heavy lifting (the rest of us were the ‘brain trust’- a position I have never been in before but honestly it was delightful to be any kind of brain, trustworthy or otherwise) it was a team effort on the part of the organizers: Luis, myself, Prudence Doherty of the University of Vermont Libraries, Professor Monica Chiu of the University of New Hampshire, Andy Kolovos of the Vermont Folklife Center and James Sturm of the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Over the two days together we had lectures, workshops and planning sessions to begin to tentatively define the contours of our exciting emerging field. Our guest speaker and keynote was Professor Marcus Weaver-Hightower, who has been the author of some of the seminal works in the field. He is also a lovely person.

I am going to borrow from the CBR NOW website, authored by Luis, as I think it sums up why we are doing this work. I’ve pasted his text in, below. However, in our conversations both before and during the two-day event, something that kept coming up were the concepts of relationality and exchange. In my own work with indigenous research methodologies and frameworks, this stands counter to the isolating, neoliberal, transactional nature of academia writ large and instead works at the pace of connection, which is slow, non-extractive, and invites everyone to the table. This is not efficient, nor is it speedy, but is rather a happening at the intersection of art and science and gift economies where, in the words of Carleton University Master Book Artist Larry Thompson, amazing things happen.  

Here’s why we are doing this:

• Relationship. Making comics as a form of scholarship is time-consuming, isolating, and still undervalued in the logocentric and peer-reviewed domain of academia. Building a supportive community of scholar-creators in relationship with partners outside of academia is an important step toward realizing the potential of comics-based research to reshape and enrich connections between creative arts and scholarly research, to develop new systems of peer review, and to communicate our research with diverse publics. Our goal is to cultivate professional, intellectual, and creative relationships across the New England Humanities Consortium to support this work.
• Professional development. A key factor holding back scholars in, or desiring to move into, arts-based research is lack of access to professional development opportunities.
• Exchange. We believe opportunities for higher ed researchers and teachers to sit together with cartoonists and other professionals involved in sequential arts will generate rich exchange and learning for all parties. Our event will be an opportunity to create, share, and exchange ideas, insights, physical objects, and artifacts with each other.
• Intervention. During the gathering, we will invite willing participants to explore the creation of an interdisciplinary, multi-modal handbook or edited volume on comics-based research, which currently does not exist. Collectively, we also need to spark a necessary conversation about CBR and its relationship with peer review and institutional standards for promotion.
• Collective benefit. This project aligns with the NEHC’s core mission to strengthen intellectual collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange between our institutions, and to provide innovative educational, intercultural, and curricular programming that broadens public visibility for research and fosters transformative thinking.

Stay tuned for more! #cbrnow