Kay Sohini: Drawing Unbelonging: Climate, Spatiotemporality and Comics

Zoom lecture by Kay Sohini, PhD Candidate in English - "Drawing Unbelonging: Climate, Spatiotemporality and Comics". Part of the Abolitionist Futures Initiative.
Sohini's dissertation, Drawing Unbelonging, uses comics as a medium of inquiry and a method to record, analyze, and narrate complex stories from the margins image-textually, in an effort to establish how belonging is usually tied to the trouble of conforming, rather than to the issue of a geographical space. It advances the field through not just textual analysis but through the practice of drawing comics with an experimental approach and expands the ways in which art-based research espouses a more equitable future for all. This talk will consider how, by using graphic autoethnography, she will engage the sociopolitical through the lens of the personal to look at pressing issues of our time, such as the detrimentally politicized response to COVID-19 and the climate crisis. She will expand on how her choice of medium allows her to harness the visual affect of comics to evoke a sense of urgency and to draw attention to systemic issues pertaining to race, gender, disability, and environmental inequality.
Recorded on November 3, 2021