Saturday, July 8 1:45pm
Comics as a medium for public linguistics
Ai Taniguchi ai.taniguchi@utoronto.ca
University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada
Haili Su haili.su@mail.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
In recent years, more and more linguists have been undertaking work in public linguistics (Price & McIntyre 2023). We propose digital comics as an effective medium for the lay-audience communication of linguistics, with benefits for both the field of linguistics and the general public.
We interviewed 13 multilingual students and turned their lived experiences into digital comics. These stories range from lighthearted instances of intercultural miscommunication to emotional journeys of Indigenous language revitalization. Each comic comes with a linguistics infographic illustrating educational content about the language(s) featured in the student story (see Figure 1). Besides raising awareness about linguistics as a field, the project objective is to increase intercultural competence in our university community and beyond.
A key component of public science communication is science capital (Archer et al. 2015): factors that make it more likely for someone to participate in science activities. A public linguist’s job is to increase science capital by anchoring linguistics to the existing experiences of our audience (Little 2023). Comics are perfect for this because of their relatability. Art theorists have argued that simplified “cartoon characters” exploit our tendency to interpret random signs as meaningful (pareidolia), allowing for a wide range of people to identify with their stories (McCloud 1994). Combining pictures and text also enhances understanding and recall of information, which is why comics are used frequently as a mode of public communication in medicine (Green & Myers 2010). In our project, we created memorable comics that encourage empathy in order to create science capital.
In this presentation, we outline the considerations that went into this project, including recruitment, expenses, art style, accessibility, dissemination, and community research ethics. We conclude with recommendations for how our comics can be used to promote equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization in linguistics classrooms. [295 words]
References
Archer, L., Dawson, E., DeWitt, J., Seakins, A., & Wong, B. (2015). “Science capital”: A conceptual, methodological, and empirical argument for extending bourdieusian notions of capital beyond the arts. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 52(7), 922-948.
Green, M. J., & Myers, K. R. (2010). Graphic medicine: use of comics in medical education and patient care. BMJ, 340.
Little, H. (2023). Principles of good research communication. In Communicating Linguistics (pp. 17-27). Routledge.
Price, H., & McIntyre, D. (2023). Public linguistics. In Communicating Linguistics (pp. 3-14). Routledge.
Figure 1. Example comic and infographic. (Read left to right, then top to bottom.)
Scholarly Teaching in Linguistics 