Can Refugee Comics Effect Political Change? Discussing Comics Journalism and “Refugeeness”
Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Recorded on 07/21/2025
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 434
In the third episode of this four-part series with Candida Rifkind and Dominic Davies, authors of Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, we discuss refugee comics as political tools. First, our guests outline the characteristics of comics journalism, highlighting its conventions, convergence with new journalism, and influential authors like Joe Sacco. Next, Candida and Dom examine how refugee comics can effect political change. Though it may be difficult to draw direct lines from comics to legislation, they share how refugee comics have been used by lawmakers and have raised awareness of refugee issues and experiences. Reflecting on the importance of critical refugee studies when writing their book, Candida and Dom define the term “refugeeness” and explain the limitations of refugee as a label. Finally, Candida provides several examples of comics’ ability to visualize the spatial characteristics of refugee camps and how they “show us that the line between refugee camps and the rest of the world is really porous.”
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
- How Graphic Refuge Explores the Ethics of Artist-Refugee Relationships
- 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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