Wiley Lecture 2022. Communicating climate change with comics: Life beyond apocalyptic imaginaries

Drawing on my experience with creative research translation, in this work I discuss how graphic novellas provide several possibilities and versatilities for geographical analysis, anti-essentialist representation of, and communication about climate change. Climate change communication tends not to depict human experiences. In response, graphic novellas can be deployed as a multi-modal method that encourages researchers to ‘thickly’ examine everyday life with climate change and to communicate to others their embodied and hidden experiences of life with climate change that are difficult to capture in other ways. In addition, graphic novellas are a powerful way for authors both to visualise how life with climate change is multitemporal, as well as still-possible, and to capture diverse images of alternative climate futures to inform debates about the geographies of hope as they relate to climate change. Finally, graphic novellas can enhance the participatory nature of research and facilitate a move to more ‘desire-based’ research frameworks that emphasise character-driven and anti-essentialist narratives. The work reported here speaks especially to geographers engaging in geohumanities and to climate change researchers who are experimenting with creative methods to narrativize and communicate human experiences of climate change. My intention is to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and speak to scholars working in the interdisciplinary fields of climate change, comics studies, climate change communication, and visual studies and invite more engagement with this mode of creative research translation.