How Graphic Refuge Explores the Ethics of Artist-Refugee Relationships
Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Recorded on 07/14/2025
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 433
In the second episode of this four-part series, Candida Rifkind and Dominic Davies dive into their writing process and the ethics of artist-refugee relationships examined in their coauthored book, Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics. Rather than collaborating throughout, Candida and Dom chose to write individual chapters and coauthor the introduction and epilogue. As they explain, this technique led to a natural dialogue between their sections in the book and a productive partnership amidst Covid lockdowns and life events.
Next, our guests summarize the artists featured in the title, which includes those with lived experiences as refugees, second generation refugees, and artists/writers commissioned by humanitarian organizations to communicate refugees’ stories. Candida and Dom then expand on the ethics between the artist and the refugee, exploring the empowerment of “refugee refusal” and spotlighting several examples of these ethical dynamics at play in Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts and Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves.
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:
- What the Implied Reader of Refugee Comics Tells Us about the Genre and Citizenship
- 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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