What the Implied Reader of Refugee Comics Tells Us about the Genre and Citizenship
Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Recorded on 07/07/2025
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 432
This month’s series welcomes the authors of Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, Candida Rifkind, Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, and Dominic Davies, Reader in English at City St George’s, University of London. In the next four episodes, we chat with Candida and Dom about the origins and unique writing process of their book, refugee comics within the comics studies discipline, and how the genre can function as a tool for political change. Further, we dig into the rise of comics journalism and the ethical relationship between a refugee and the artist depicting their experiences.
In the first episode of this series, Candida and Dom introduce us to refugee comics, defining the genre, its history, and readership. As our guests explain, comics have long chronicled the stories of outsiders—Superman as a refugee from Krypton, for example—and depicting or drawing the experiences of displacement has existed as long as displacement itself. Next, Candida and Dom contemplate the nebulous term “refugee” and how they interpreted it for their book, in addition to the importance of the reader to refugee comics’ tone and impact. As our guests point out, the main audience of refugee comics are those who have citizenship, thereby revealing a complex relationship between reader and author; as Candida underscores, “the very idea of a refugee can only exist if there is an idea of a citizen, and vice versa.”
Access the transcript of the episode. Please note that the transcript was generated by Zoom’s automated captioning and is not a perfect transcription.
About the guests:
Candida Rifkind
Professor of English
University of Winnipeg
Candida Rifkind is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she specializes in alternative comics and Canadian literature. In addition to numerous publications, she co-edited Documenting Trauma: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage in Comics (Palgrave 2020) and Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016).
Dominic Davies
Reader in English
City St George’s, University of London
Dominic Davies is Reader in English at City St George’s, University of London. He writes widely on infrastructure, empire, and migration in literature and culture. He is the author of Urban Comics (Routledge 2019) and The Broken Promise of Infrastructure (Lawrence Wishart 2023), and co-editor of Documenting Trauma in Comics (Palgrave 2020), among other books.
Enjoy the conversation? Listen to the rest of the series:
- How Graphic Refuge Explores the Ethics of Artist-Refugee Relationships
- Can Refugee Comics Effect Political Change? Discussing Comics Journalism and “Refugeeness”
- Expanding Refugee Comics through Interdisciplinarity, Documenting the War on Gaza, and Moving Beyond Trauma Studies
Check out our previous series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press:
– Talking Infrastructure, Education, and Canada and the Blackface Atlantic
– Podcasting in Academia: A critical look at its potential and discussing a new book, Podcast Studies
– Exploring Ecologies in Practice and Environmental Humanities
– Outlining the “Big, Big Tent” of Comics Studies
– The Contemporary Leonard Cohen
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