The UBC Comics Studies Cluster collaborates with academic, non-profit, Indigenous, and community partners to support their production of comics and graphic novels. We help our partners find funding and support them in participating in comics co-creation through project facilitation and management. If you’re interested in partnering with the UBC Comics Studies Cluster, please email comics.studies@ubc.ca.
Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North
Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North is a three-year, Indigenous-led initiative that connects storytellers, artists, and scholars from across the Circumpolar North to share stories of Indigenous survivance through comics, documentary film, podcasts, and digital media. Spanning Canada, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Sápmi (Norway, Sweden, Finland), and Denmark, the project brings together First Nation, Métis, Inuit, and Sámi knowledge holders to co-create graphic narratives and arts-based public programming that highlight resilience, resurgence, renewal, revival, and resistance.
Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (Turtle Island Cluster)
The UBC Pop Culture Cluster supports the Turtle Island Cluster of the SSHRC-funded Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project hosted at the University of Victoria. The Turtle Island Cluster is situated in two regions of Canada, Vancouver and Ottawa, with two graphic narratives emerging through the collaboration of Indigenous co-leads, Shannon Leddy and Duncan McCue, settler scholar Biz Nijdam, Indian Residential School survivors and two Indigenous graphic novelists.
“Xwemalhkwu Hero Stories” Comics Project with the Homalco First Nation
The “Xwemalhkwu Hero Stories” Comics Project is an ongoing collaboration between Education without Borders, the UBC Comics Studies Cluster, Homalco journalist and media personality Tchadas Leo, and the Homalco First Nation. The project collaborated with Indigenous cartoonists Alina Pete, Gord Hill, and Valen Onstine to create three short comics on the traditional knowledge and cultural practices of the Homalco First Nation.
Exams Under Anaesthesia
“Exams Under Anaesthesia (EUA) Graphics: Equity and Neurodiversity in the Operating Room” is a project undertaken by the UBC Comic Studies Cluster, led by Dr Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam, in collaboration with community-based pediatrician Anamaria Richardson, that seeks nine cartoonists to create 9 short graphic novels based on the experiences of neurodiverse children on their experience in the BC healthcare system.
Linguaphobia, Linguistic Indifference & the Monolingual University
This project, directed by Drs. David Gramling and Ervin Malakaj, seeks to address the “muffledness” of visual imagery depicting multilingualism by expanding the multilinguistic visual imagination, pushing past simple and simplistic answers. Six artists are creating critical, conceptual, experiential, personal, and political visual narratives of various kinds that test the boundaries and critical power of the concepts of Linguaphobia (fear of language(s), Linguistic Disobedience, Linguistic Indifference, the Monolingual University and Authoritarian Language.
Youth Perspectives on Trauma-Informed Care: A Comics Collaboration
This project brings together pediatric health researchers, the Canadian Paediatric Society, and comics artists to co-create knowledge mobilization tools that centre youth voices in trauma-informed health care. Guided by a national Youth Advisory Council (YAC), the collaboration draws on community-based participatory methods to ensure that young people’s lived experiences shape how trauma-informed care is understood and practiced.