This book contributes to a growing body of work celebrating the visual methods and tools that aid knowledge transfer and welcome new audiences to social science research. Visual research methodological milestones highlight a trajectory towards the adoption of more creative and artistic media. As such, the book is dedicated to exploring the creative potential of the comic book medium, and how it can assist the production and communication of scientific knowledge. The cultural blueprint of the comic book is examined, and the unique structure and grammar of the form deconstructed and adapted for research support. Along with two illustrated research comics, Toxic Play and 10 Business Days, the book offers readers numerous comic-based illustration activities and creative visual exercises to support data generation, foster conversational knowledge exchanges, facilitate inference, analysis, and interpretation, while nurturing the necessary skills to illustrate and create research comics. The book engages a diverse audience and is an illuminating read for visual novices, experts, and all in-betweeners.

All people could do was speculate on the fate of those who vanished - strangers; seemingly random, unconnected: all plucked from their lives and never seen again. The notes found left behind, apparently describing some slender reason for their removal, were all that linked them. They were all delivered by one man. Rodney Moon had admitted seeing those who had been disappeared and to passing the notes, but denied any involvement beyond that. Who wrote the letters, then? Moon shrugged during the trial: 'It has no name,' he said. 'It's a bogeyman. A monster.' He was not mourned when the vengeful bereft finally found him. Some years later, four strangers; seemingly random, unconnected, all take the last train home. But something each of them has forgotten - or is trying to forget - is catching up with them; with a terrible, inexorable purpose. The devil is in the detail, as they say.

Optical Allusions is for those people seeking a painstakingly researched, scientifically accurate, eye-themed comic book adventure! Wrinkles the Wonder Brain has lost his bosses eye and now he has to search all of human imagination for it. Along the way, he confronts biology head on and accidentally learns more about eyes and the evolution of vision than he thought possible. And, as if a compelling story with disembodied talking brains, shape-changing proteins, and giant robot eyes wasn't enough, each tale is followed by a fully illustrated, in-depth exploration of the ideas introduced in the comic story. Designed to be a hybrid college text book/comic book, Optical Allusions is suitable for advanced readers with an interest in evolution and real science. 127 pages.

The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page. In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

Winner of the Popular Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular or American Culture In the 1940s and ’50s, comic books were some of the most popular—and most unfiltered—entertainment in the United States. Publishers sold hundreds of millions of copies a year of violent, racist, and luridly sexual comics to Americans of all ages until a 1954 Senate investigation led to a censorship code that nearly destroyed the industry. But this was far from the first time the US government actively involved itself with comics—it was simply the most dramatic manifestation of a long, strange relationship between high-level policy makers and a medium that even artists and writers often dismissed as a creative sewer. In Pulp Empire, Paul S. Hirsch uncovers the gripping untold story of how the US government both attacked and appropriated comic books to help wage World War II and the Cold War, promote official—and clandestine—foreign policy and deflect global critiques of American racism. As Hirsch details, during World War II—and the concurrent golden age of comic books—government agencies worked directly with comic book publishers to stoke hatred for the Axis powers while simultaneously attempting to dispel racial tensions at home. Later, as the Cold War defense industry ballooned—and as comic book sales reached historic heights—the government again turned to the medium, this time trying to win hearts and minds in the decolonizing world through cartoon propaganda. Hirsch’s groundbreaking research weaves together a wealth of previously classified material, including secret wartime records, official legislative documents, and caches of personal papers. His book explores the uneasy contradiction of how comics were both vital expressions of American freedom and unsettling glimpses into the national id—scourged and repressed on the one hand and deployed as official propaganda on the other. Pulp Empire is a riveting illumination of underexplored chapters in the histories of comic books, foreign policy, and race.

This book contributes to a growing body of work celebrating the visual methods and tools that aid knowledge transfer and welcome new audiences to social science research. Visual research methodological milestones highlight a trajectory towards the adoption of more creative and artistic media. As such, the book is dedicated to exploring the creative potential of the comic book medium, and how it can assist the production and communication of scientific knowledge. The cultural blueprint of the comic book is examined, and the unique structure and grammar of the form deconstructed and adapted for research support. Along with two illustrated research comics, Toxic Play and 10 Business Days, the book offers readers numerous comic-based illustration activities and creative visual exercises to support data generation, foster conversational knowledge exchanges, facilitate inference, analysis, and interpretation, while nurturing the necessary skills to illustrate and create research comics. The book engages a diverse audience and is an illuminating read for visual novices, experts, and all in-betweeners.

This book demonstrates how participatory arts-based approaches can help children and youth contribute to peacebuilding within post-conflict contexts and to their communities. Cultural forms of storytelling through visual arts, drama, music, and dance can help to enhance post-conflict community well-being, social cohesion, and conflict prevention. However, in the planning and implementation of these arts-based projects, children and youth are often marginalised in decision-making processes. Drawing on cases from Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia, and Nepal, this book demonstrates the benefits of participatory action research with children and youth to inform education curricula and policies for sustaining peace. Showing how artforms can be adapted to meet the needs of children and youth, the book emphasises the need to scale up arts-based peacebuilding initiatives and leverage for greater policy enactment from the bottom up. It is also an excellent example of South–South learning, advocating for a local approach to engage with arts-based methodologies and peacebuilding. This book will be of interest to researchers across the applied arts, sociology, anthropology, political science, peacebuilding, and international development. Practitioners and policymakers would also benefit from the book’s recommendations for the implementation of successful arts-based research projects and interventions.

Awarded QRSIG's Honerable Mention for 2021 2020 AESA Critics' Choice Book Award Winner Arts-Based Educational Research and Qualitative Inquiry introduces novice qualitative researchers, within education and related fields, to arts-based educational research (ABER). Abundant prompts and exercises are provided to help readers apply the concepts and experiment with various applications of the ideas presented. The authors walk the path with novice researchers offering a variety of approaches to the practice of arts-based methods, while providing a guided overview of ABER, and include pedagogical features in each chapter. Exercises are designed to assist educational researchers who wish to expand their repertoire of methodologies. The authors also weave into the discussion the possibilities and limitations of many types of arts-based methods while introducing readers to the growing methodological literature. By offering a tapestry of ways to engage the novice researcher, the book illustrates that it is not always possible to separate cognitive findings from aesthetic knowing. This book will help qualitative researchers to expand their methodologies to include arts-based approaches to their projects and by doing so reshape their identities as qualitative researchers. It also offers some evaluative criteria and tool kits for experimenting with various arts and educational research.

This edited volume brings together work in the field of empirical comics research. Drawing on computer and cognitive science, psychology and art history, linguistics and literary studies, each chapter presents innovative methods and establishes the practical and theoretical motivations for the quantitative study of comics, manga, and graphic novels. Individual chapters focus on corpus studies, the potential of crowdsourcing for comics research, annotation and narrative analysis, cognitive processing and reception studies. This volume opens up new perspectives for the study of visual narrative, making it a key reference for anyone interested in the scientific study of art and literature as well as the digital humanities.

Good Question is a textbook intended for children and youth, teachers and researchers interested in doing collaborative research in their community. The volume starts out as comic book research methods textbook that intends to introduce children and youth to the fundamental structure of the research process, its elements and steps as well as with the research activities associated with the different aspects of research practice in general and arts-based/image-based research in particular. This unique approach allows children and youth to learn the "e;craft of research"e; in a play-ful way and to become knowledgeable and competent co-researchers with adults, contributing to all phases of the study's design. The volume encourages teachers and researchers to see the important role of play in teaching children and young people about the research process, and gives them the tools to engage children and youth in playful arts-based/image-based inquiries. The complexity of exploring collaborative research required an innovative way of overcoming the linearity of a paper-bound print text and the way we read it. The volume is intentionally organized in three sections, starting with the comic book because it invites an openness to layered, non-linear (research) literacy. The volume also includes an anthology of research examples of conducting arts-based/image-based research with children, and several theoretical essays focused on play as research and collaborative arts-based/image-based research.The later sections featuring research examples and theory, though heavily illustrated, have been peer reviewed and formatted more in the academic tradition. Thus, Good Question represents an attempt to make sense of children's play-ful engagement in arts-based/image-based inquiry activities with adults as research. By playing with the forms and traditions of the comic book, the research methods textbook, and the academic book together we have attempted to respectfully disassemble and reassemble book form. We invite readers to discover those 'research conventions' that are capable of establishing what is gathered and presented here as collaborative research with children. We imagine this volume contributing to the quest "e;for new ways of living together, of generating...more and more incisive and inclusive dialogues"e; (Greene, 1994, p. 459) as both a personal and a collective endeavor.