COPE Socials: Telling ‘graphic’ stories about climate change

The Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research (COPE) is continuing its networking events, this time on Zoom. For each meeting, we invite an expert to talk for approximately 30 minutes, followed by a 15 minute Q&A.

Gemma Sou, RMIT University, will discuss the ethics, praxis, and politics of communicating climate change-focused research into comics. Drawing on her recent collaborative comic, ‘Living with Climate Change: Everyday Stories from the World’s Margins’ (2022) she will discuss how combining research on the everyday experiences of climate change and the ‘technology’ of comics is well positioned to produce compelling and nuanced stories that provoke us to reconsider several dominant commonplaces about people and places experiencing climate change. Understanding and responding to the changing climate will require recognizing and engaging multiple, diverse experiences of agency, a process that attention to comics can help facilitate.

Gemma Sou is a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at RMIT University in Australia. She draws on postcolonial discourse to explore development in disaster-affected contexts, everyday lived experiences of disasters, the media representation of disasters, and creative research translation. Most of her work has focused on South America and the Caribbean region. More details can be found at www.gemmasou.com.