In Céline Keller’s Who is Afraid of Degrowth?, the publicly accessible debate on degrowth is curated and restaged in a comic format. Keller’s illustrations not only visualize the conversations as they happen across a range of platforms—from snappy, heated retorts on “X,” to long scholarly treatises, memes, and infographics floating around the web—but contextualizes them within the network of references and influences. Moreover, drawing on Victor Fei Lim’s framework for multimodal discourse analysis, Keller’s own stance within the debate becomes clear through the illustrations and her staging of the mise en scene and the mise en page (to apply Geraint D’Arcy’s terms, 2020). This review examines how Keller not only indexes the argument for and against debate, but inserts her own arguments through the visual plane, showing how Who is Afraid of Degrowth? imagines an alternative to the current patterns of public discourse.
The review is available open access at Degrowth Journal.
