Pleased to share word, that I’ll be the opening keynote speaker for the Graphic Medicine Conference this July! The conference will be held July 16-18, 2024 in Athlone, Ireland – and brings together comics makers and health care professionals from around the globe! Alongside my keynote, I’ll be doing two workshops for attendees before the conference gets into full swing. (See workshop materials you can use here!) Learn about the conference and graphic medicine here, and see the full program here! Also, an excellent article on the conference and graphic medicine as a whole in the Irish Times here. As someone who has been incorporating graphic medicine into my teaching all along, I’ve been compiling resources related to graphic medicine, and all can be found on my site here.
In addition to these activities, with my colleague Emily Beitiks, I’ve organized an exhibition of our ongoing Accessible Comics Project for blind/low vision readers. Check out our online accessible version of the exhibition here, and see this quick summary:
Comics Beyond Sight: Innovations in Accessible Comics for Blind & Low Vision Readers
Comics are increasingly called upon to convey public health information and are central in literacy development for young readers, yet for people who are blind or low vision, there are few means of accessing the comics form available today. This exhibition showcases the international efforts of innovators in this realm, assembled by the Accessible Comics Collective at San Francisco State University, with the expertise of blind access professionals guiding the field forward. Whether audio, tactile, or technologically mediated, these explorations in accessible comics raise bigger questions: What makes a comic a comic? How far from the original art form can a verbal translation stray while still honoring the artist’s work? The exhibition will provide opportunities to touch, listen, and explore, putting into practice the multimodal forms of access for which it advocates. By presenting a range of examples, from audio description to tactile comics, and from simpler layouts to highly complex artistic styles, we aim to demonstrate that all comics can be made accessible.
Explore the exhibition here https://spinweaveandcut.com/accexhibition/. And ALL of our past events and resources around this topic can be found on my site here.
I was a guest on Lucy Starbuck Braidley’s podcast Comic Boom (UK) back in the spring – you can listen to that conversation on comics, education, and my process on the podcast here.
Plugging away on the new work – Nostos is coming along. See any of the various social media feeds to see a sneak peek! Stay well – Nick