Creating „Light in Dark Times”: Art and Anthropology in Graphic Form

In this joint presentation, an anthropologist-writer and an artist-anthropologist reflect on aspects of their extraordinary collaboration in the making of Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, a graphic novel rooted in nonfiction comprised of fictionalized encounters with writers, philosophers, activists and anthropologists. The collaboration and its published book are unique in bringing together serious scholarship and contemporary aesthetics, elevating the graphic genre by presenting complex philosophical and political themes in a mixed media format. In this presentation, the artist and the author describe the process of their artistic creation, an exceptional experiment in art, aesthetics and anthropology. Designed to reach multiple audiences, the book conveys the drama of the world in dark times and difficult circumstances even as it reveals spaces of excitement and hope. The reflections on the production process in this presentation provide insight into innovative ways of demonstrating the relevance of scholarship to real-world concerns, and how to take advantage of multimodal formats to produce, disseminate and receive knowledge in the interest of a more just, ethical world.

Alisse Waterston is Presidential Scholar and Professor, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author or editor of seven books. A Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in the Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality (2020-2022), she served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2015-17. Waterston serves as Editor of the book series, Intimate Ethnography (Berghahn Books). Recent articles are “Imagining World Solidarities for a Livable Future,” and a work of ethnographic fiction titled, “Interiors.”

Charlotte Corden is an illustrator and fine artist whose work often centers around what it is to be human. She has an MA in anthropology from University College London, and has studied at both the London Fine Art Studios and the Arts Student’s League in New York. Corden’s work frequently appears in Anthropology News, the member magazine of the American Anthropological Association.

Dofinansowano z programu „Społeczna odpowiedzialność nauki” Ministra Edukacji i Nauki.

[yannaleyva]

I hate this book and everything from the ugly ethnographic series novels. The art makes everything annoying to even look at, and the chopped-up bubbles of text that seems better suited to passage or novel don't even have a font that is easy to read, and I keep having to try to zoom in jus to understand text that I desperately don't want to read but have to because it's assigned, but I keep looking for a pirated copy because I don't want to pay for this shit, it's hideous