Colloquium Series: Sherine Hamdy: "What can comics offer medical anthropology?"

Comics and graphic narratives effectively embody people's experiences and elicit bodily reactions in their readers. And yet, medical anthropologists, by and large,  have shied away from communicating their insights via sensory-rich media like comics, despite being attuned to the body's processes and its attunements. I contrast this hesitance in the academic social sciences to take comics seriously as a form of knowledge, with the ways  in which medical schools and medical journals have embraced graphic narratives. Why have the social sciences remained generally iconophobic, while academic medicine has recognized the potential for comics to provide insight into medical encounters? I present numerous examples of graphic medicine, and in particular Arab women's comics that break taboos about illness, and demand the visibility of their bodies and basic rights to bodily autonomy. I conclude by offering some ideas into how medical anthropology and comics could provide useful frameworks for one another.

Event is free and open to the public. Light reception to follow.