In time of eco-social urgencies and global transformations, ecology is increasingly gaining interest as a topic in graphic narratives. Yet, despite recent academic investigations into eco-comics, the multiple links between memory and ecology in graphic narratives remain largely unexplored. Memory is an important lens which informs our current framework and shapes our capacity to imagine future choices. It is often regarded as a genuine human cognitive ability and, therefore, remains a highly anthropocentric concept. This also applies to graphic narratives, which have been largely studied as a medium of autobiographical memory in the 21^st century. In the line of ecocritical and posthumanist critiques (Landsberg 1995, Kennedy 2017), it is necessary to reconsider memory in graphic narratives in the larger perspective of encompassing human as well as other-than-human memory and explore the multiple relationships between them.

This project aims at exploring eco-memory in graphic narratives through selected places, by using comics-based research – meaning research in comics form (Kuttner, Sousanis & Weaver-Hightower 2018). Today, graphic narratives are widely recognized as a largely accessible and contemporary means to present, produce and question knowledge in a visual-verbal form. Additionally, comics-based research – in sense of the narrower field of research in comics form – has the potential to question traditional, text-based formats in the sciences through arts-based methodologies and a strong sense of situatedness.

Secret Places of Eco-memory

Headerbild: © Bettina Egger