15-20 Minute Paper
Nick Sousanis
Doctoral candidate, Teachers College, Columbia University
Biography
Nick Sousanis cultivates his creative practice at the intersection of image and text. A doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University, he is writing and drawing his dissertation entirely in comic book form, believed to be the first of its kind.
Abstract
Through a dissertation both written and drawn entirely in comic book format, I seek to challenge the verbal’s dominance as the legitimate form of inquiry within the academy and radically re-‐envision what scholarship can look like. The dissertation’s visual-‐verbal form itself, in which the visual is not mere illustration but integral partner in meaning making, embodies its argument for the educational value of visual thinking. Inherently multimodal, the comics medium is both able to be read sequentially like text while also viewed all-‐at-‐once like visual art, thereby offering a unique means of handling the sequential, tangential, and nonlinear shape of our thinking. Comics’ spatial interplay of image and text is a powerful tool for thought and a fertile medium for expanding the dimensionality of discourse.
I offer this dissertation’s union of theory and practice, of aesthetics and the academic, as demonstration of how comics can serve as a rich site for creative and critical practice. Furthermore, I see this work as contributing to the growing body of alternative forms of scholarship and increasing efforts to disrupt, expand, and redefine the form of scholarly inquiry within the academy. For this presentation, I expect to have the completed, drawn dissertation to share.