Anthropology 497CR - ST-ComicsCartoons&CommAnthro

In this class you'll explore comics, animation and other visual and arts-based approaches of communicating scholarly work with diverse publics. You'll read what others have said about these topics and also spend time learning to create your own comics and animations. Drawing skills are not required! You will not be graded on your drawing skills! Many of the methods we explore don't rely on any form of drawing, others involve simple stick figure sketching. In our hyper-visual culture, presenting information or research in a visually engaging way can have a powerful impact. Whether you want to work at a non-profit, in a science or medicine field, at a museum, or in academia, visual methods like comics and animation aid us in telling engaging, memorable stories about anthropology, science, and the world around us. Storytelling and use of visual and arts-based methods are also important skills in the research toolkit. Creating visual stories through comics and animation is enjoyable; it brings much needed creativity to our work and school lives, while at the same time helping to democratize knowledge, and fulfilling our ethical responsibilities to share scholarship outside the academy. These tools will allow you to present information in an engaging way and move it into the hands and minds of public audiences, policy makers, community partners, and other scholars, in your own field or across disciplines. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Anth majors.