Abstract
Giada Peterle has been writing about comics, and has worked as a trained and published comics artist, for over a decade. Grounded and trained in literary and cultural studies, she has built up a solid portfolio of multilingual work in narrative and visual approaches, pioneering sensitive, place-based ethnographic approaches to graphic research. This book is aimed particularly at social scientists, and specifically those within the geohumanities, as well as urban, cultural and literary geographies, and collects and builds upon her body of work, offering an important framing introduction to the field. It contains sections on what it means to develop creative interventions in urban spaces, how to do this with different partners, including public bodies and artists, and what it might mean and lead to as a research practice. If you have been intrigued by the recent enthusiasm in geography for visual and creative methods that rely on graphic narrative and comics, then this book is an indispensable and long awaited starting point that provides both theoretical grounding and fantastic practical vignettes. It is delightfully unapologetic in embracing what might be a paradox in some geographical circles: being at once fundamentally grounded in representational approaches while also heartily embracing non-representational, practice-based literatures and theories, in particular drawing from and contributing to debates on affect and assemblage. Comics, here, imply ‘a processual understanding of representation; and a narrative conception of urban space’ (p. 3). Perhaps engaging with diverse literatures from outside the Anglosphere – in this case from Italy – can lead to a less bounded engagement with different schools of thought, taking the best from many worlds that sometimes make big efforts to set themselves apart?
Peterle certainly makes a very compelling and visually-rich point about why adopting what she calls a geoGraphic approach that is open-ended and experiential can change how we carry out and communicate research. It is certainly not only about sharing research results within comics, something that has been done successfully by other scholars as a form of popularization or public engagement. Instead, for Peterle, doing comics as a social scientist means engaging with the creative, narrative, context-based and at time fuzzy practices of engaging with and intervening in urban spaces, embracing a kind of ‘spatial thinking’ that focusses on the process of producing, registering and presenting research. It involves taking on comics as both objects and performative practices, as things shaped not only by the author but also encountered and shaped by readers. Comics create connections and relationships, activate processes that have consequences far beyond the physical space of the frame, the page, or the book. Peterle fills her book with examples and anecdotes, using these to make her point about engagement and materiality beyond representation. I loved the tale of the frames displayed as art-works in Padova’s train station: in the heat of the summer, just after being hung, the glue melted and the pages fell down, marked and trampled perhaps by some of the very people whose lives they narrated.
Peterle has a unique ability and skill in crafting such visual tales, building upon snapshots and fragments of people and places that construct a wider landscape, assembled through multiple encounters. In Chapter 5, for example, she reflects on the methodology used for her beautiful recent book Lines on trams and mobility in Turku (Estonia). She explains how she uses graphic narrative to craft stories about places that are shaped and given life by people who take on shifting roles as tour guides, characters, narrators and builders not only of their own worlds but of the social fabric of the city itself. Words and images help readers to understand how collective memories are shaped in place, as individuals inhabit and add their own layer of meaning to a city through daily routines, movements and mobilities. Like many of the examples developed in this beautiful book, it offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of how Peterle works and uses comics as an integral part of fieldwork, rooted in careful ethnography and observation, including the use of photography and archive-work to collect diverse visual materials. She does not simply draw the city as it appears, but rather uses her careful collage-style page composition, built up step by step, layer by layer, to rethink and illustrate how memory and heritage shape and haunt our lives, held together by the strokes of the author’s pen as much as by the lines traced by the tram tracks.
This book is a creative, clever, mature and subtle reflection on what can happen when scholars experiment different ways of doing research, broadening the geographical toolbox methodologically but also showing what the best of place-based, ethnographic, embodied and creative geographies have to offer the social sciences more broadly.
