Cartooning in the Borderlands

• In Event: Comics as Research: Toward an Imaginative Methodology

Abstract

Making comics is about dwelling in the borderlands. As a marginalized art form that emerged from the gutters and the shadows of art and literature, cartooning is culturally and historically attuned to dissent. In an age of aggressive standardization in educational settings, cartooning provides a possibility to construct a “comics consciousness”, allowing the practitioner to shift in and out of various modes of opposition for the purpose of critiquing and disturbing dominant social orders without locking oneself into a static binary. As a practice, cartooning weaves together both lived experiences and imagined realities, blurring the line between what is and what could (never) be.
This paper explores the possibilities cartooning presents for reimagining research. As a Latino cartoonist navigating the border between Latino and American/o, I use cartooning as a way of resisting modernist notions of teaching, learning, and being in the world. I weave between my own dissertation-as-graphic novel and my lived experiences to explore the relationship between making comics and knowing, and the ways this process makes possible new approaches to educational research.
For Latin@s, the borderlands exist as an inner, conceptual space, marked by competing ideological positions and often resulting in feelings of dis/placement and dis/embodiment. I explore my practice of using comics to merge a cultural-historical space for dissent with an artistic form built on visually fractured and segmented panels. Together, these work to form a semblance of a singular, counter-narrative, making visible understandings of the self and the world that have previously been inaccessible or systematically silenced. I conceive of cartooning as materializing Gloria Anzaldúa’s “conciencia de la mestiza”, constructing a pluralist space for competing, intersecting, overlapping, contradictory, and complimentary discourses and movements. As a form of educational research, cartooning asks new questions about the ways knowledge of the world and self are constructed and understood.

Author

• Jarod Roselló, Pennsylvania State University