Or, share your own recommendations in the comments!) There are so many brilliant comics artists out there, and there’s even a whole American Anthropologist piece about anthropology and comics! (If you’re really stuck and need comic recommendations, Tweet at me with a few books you like or subjects you’re interested in. For those who are interested in examples of the intersections of ethnography and comics, as a very small start, I really like Tings Chak’s Undocumented: the Architecture of Migrant Detention (unfortunately currently out of print), Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Safdar Ahmed’s “ Villawood“, the satire/non-fiction comics website The Nib, Eleanor Davis’s You & a Bike & a Road, and “ At Work Inside our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” by Sam Wallman and others at the now-defunct Global Mail. The work I refer to below is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is an excellent resource for comics artists and readers alike.

In particular, I am wrestling with how the gutter between comics panels is something to consider in terms of ethnographic narratives. What Chak’s work makes clear is that we need to abolish both of these violent systems in order to have a world that is equitable and safe.In a departure from more conventional communication methods in academia, I’m exploring how comics–a medium I love to read and am learning to make (thank you to my teacher in pre-pandemic times, Julian Peters!)–speak to ethnographic practice. Unlike prisons, detention centres also hold children. Just like prisons, migrant detention centres disproportionately imprison queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour. Aesthetically, this is transported through diagrams of the spaces and people inside (and outside) of detention centres. It contemplates themes of identity, humanity, status, power, freedom, fragmentation, trauma, institutional violence, home, family, and belonging. Their work makes the connection between prisons and detention centres clear. Chak is a ‘multidisciplinary artist trained in architectural design whose work draws inspiration from anti-colonial, migrant justice, prison abolition, and spatial justice struggles’. Tings Chak’s zine is part of a larger published book “Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention”. We hide the things we don’t want to see or that we don’t want to be seen.” – Tings Chak

But their invisibility is no coincidence. “Spaces of incarceration are both nowhere and everywhere, blended into our landscapes.

Undocumented by Tings Chak