The organizing team includes:

• Luis Vivanco, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at UVM (PI). He is founding coordinator of UVM’s Comics-Based Research Lab, and an enthusiastic creator of comics based on his ethnographic and historical research on bicycle culture and politics and crow-human relations.
• Sally Pirie, Professor of Child and Family Studies at UMass Amherst (Co-PI). She is founding coordinator of the UMass Comics-Based Research Lab. She has published her research extensively in comics form, and is a trailblazer in the broader landscape of CBR.
• Monica Chiu, Professor and Chair of English at UNH (Co-PI). She specializes in Asian American Studies, with a current focus on Asian-American graphic narratives and manga. She recently organized Drawing Together, a story-telling project through cartooning in New Hampshire’s Indonesian-American community.
• James Sturm, co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies (White River Jct., Vermont) and its Applied Cartooning Lab. He is a Eisner Award-winning comics creator and leading figure in the applied cartooning movement.
• Andy Kolovos, Associate Director of Vermont Folklife. He is a folklorist who promotes ethnographic cartooning, and is a central organizer of Vermont’s Non-Fiction Comics Fest.
• Prudence Doherty, Public Services Librarian, Jack and Shirley Silver Special Collections Library, UVM. She co-coordinates UVM’s Comics-Based Research Lab, and manages the library’s collections in book arts, comics, and zines.

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.