We are excited to welcome guest Andrea Hoff to our online (school’s out for summer) lecture at the Comics Lab! This talk aims to collectively explore methods in which the theories and methods of critical posthumanism can be interwoven into teaching and learning practices. The case study demonstrates how speculative comics creation is one particularly hybrid theory/method, and how through its practice, we may all reimagine the present/future through a more embodied, entangled, and collaborative view.
6pm CET June 27, 2024
Duration: 1 hour, Q&A afterwards
Sign up to receive the Zoom link here.
Here’s a full description of the talk:
“Teens Reframing the Future: A Speculative Comics Workshop as Posthuman Practice”
This presentation explores how youth may productively engage with posthuman practices through the creation of speculative comics. It investigates how the visual-textual modes of comics offer a practice of storytelling that is uniquely aligned with a critical posthumanist worldview. Critical posthumanism, in this sense, is a direct response to anthropocentrism, and an opportunity to envision human-more-than-human-technological entanglements (Haraway, 1991; Barad, 2007) while also challenging the belief that humans have ever been autonomous from (or, for that matter, central to) the world we inhabit. The series of workshops that this talk draws upon was designed to support teens to develop and communicate their ideas about living in the “present/future” (Bayley, 2018, p.5), while simultaneously providing space for them to explore the emotional and embodied experiences that arise from crafting speculative comics. The structure of the workshops was informed by speculative design practices, comics-based research methods, and the theories of posthuman pedagogy. Exploring how the creation of speculative comics offers a space for youth to engage in critical posthumanism, this presentation opens with a reflection on the design and facilitation of the speculative comics workshop through a posthumanist lens. To further support this reading, I include a posthuman critical analysis from a selection of their speculative comics.
This talk aims to collectively explore methods in which the theories and methods of critical posthumanism can be interwoven into teaching and learning practices. The case study I present demonstrates how speculative comics creation is one particularly hybrid theory/method, and how through its practice, we may all reimagine the present/future through a more embodied, entangled, and collaborative view.
Keywords: comics-based research; speculative comics; posthuman pedagogy; youth-centred practices; entanglements
