Butterfly Hunt

ibrary building of Malmö University (2023). CC-by Maria Eklind, via Wikimedia Commons. I’m super excited to be taking part in the workshop “What We Talk About When We Talk About Comics: Towards a Metadiscourse for Comics Studies,” to be hosted at Malmö University, Sweden on May 3–5, 2026. This invitation-only, in-person event brings together an international group of scholars to reflect on the…

Será un honor participar nuevamente en el Congreso Internacional de Estudios sobre Cómic, ahora en su segunda edición, correspondiente a 2026. El título del congreso es “Los territorios del miedo”. El programa ya está disponible a través de la página web del evento. Como siempre, expreso mi agradecimiento al Dr Alfredo Guzmán Tinajero por sus hospitalarios y generosos esfuerzos como…

Panel depicting Ernesto Priego as a comic book charcter, taken from ]Ernesto Priego, Linda Berube, Francisco de la Mora, Ian Cooke, Stephann Makri, and Stella Wisdom. 2023. UK Digital Comics: Challenges and Opportunities of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership. A Co-designed Comic Poster [Poster]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22717675.v2 I’m very grateful to have been announced as a…

“Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existant. And this is precisely what the present system’s mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.” – John Berger, Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible, 2001 The…

On Tuesday 31 March 2026, for the tenth session of the postgraduate module I lead, INM317 Design Justice, I invited Elisabetta Lando and Simon Abbott to facilitate a collage workshop as part of hands-on activities related to zine-making. Simon and Elisabetta’s opening slide on the classroom’s screen. Elisabetta Lando and Simon Abbott (standing) talk to INM317 Design Justice students The…

On Tuesday 24 March 2026, futures designer Viraj Joshi joined the Human-Computer Interaction Design MSc module I lead, INM317 Design Justice, for a guest session on speculative design and comics. Viraj is a Service and Interaction Designer and Design Futures Lead at Fjord, now Accenture Song, in London. He is also a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, and the…

I‘ve always believed one must try to do the walk, not just the talk. Or as we used to say back in the prehistoric days, we need hacking, not just yacking. My module’s coursework requires creating a zine, so I made a quick how-to zine for my students. I made this quick-and-dirty zine to show students that creating a zine is indeed possible. You can make it with very basic resources. This may be…

I feel like I need to start this post by saying I find it sad I have not been able to blog more frequently. When I’ve had time I haven’t had the energy. My workload this year has increased considerably and often within very short notice. The rapid code switching is exhausting, and the feeling that one cannot realistically ever be on top of everything is demoralising and, frankly, depressing.…

In case you missed it, I share information I earlier posted on other channels. The Comics Grid’s 15th volume, corresponding to 2025 has been wrapped. The Times They Are a-Changin’ We would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to all colleagues who submitted their work to us and showed patience and understanding throughout the editorial process. Processing times have been longer than…

You are warmly invited to the Graphic Refuge panel event with Dr Dominic Davies (City St George’s Media, Culture and Creative Industries) and Dr Candida Rifkind (University of Winnipeg, Canada) on Wednesday the 19th of November, at 5pm [UK time], at City St. George’s University of London.  This hybrid panel (part of MCCI’s Connect: Bridging Research, Innovation, Education and Professional…

On the morning of Saturday 8 November 2025, I took part in the Comics Against Capitalism panel within the 22nd Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London. The session brought together myself, Dominic Davies and Reed Puc (who has just submitted his PhD dissertation under our supervision), and it proved to be one of those rare conference moments that felt genuinely collaborative and…

As online culture has moved towards algorithmic social media and instant messaging it is harder and harder to keep this site updated. September is almost finishing and I haven’t documented here the work we did convening the Comics & AI: Critical Prompts one-day conference at City St George’s University of London, on Thursday 4 September 2025. Shortly after the conference I published a quick post…

On Friday 13 June 2025 I am participating in the Knowing Infrastructures workshop. My discussion paper is titled “Teaching Against the Grain: Reclaiming Uncertainty in Assessment and Learning“. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Paulo Freire argues that the path to liberation lies in a dialectical unity of theory and practice—what he calls praxis—driven by “epistemological curiosity.” Yet in…

We cordially invite you to “Comics & AI: Critical Prompts”, a one-day multidisciplinary conference on the future of comics, technology, and creativity. Proceedings on Thursday 4 September 2025, 10am-6pm at City St George’s, University of London, Northampton Square (Clerkenwell Campus), London, UK. We are calling scholars, technologists, artists, writers, designers, and practitioners to propose…

Randall Munroe, “Next Slide, Please”, https://xkcd.com/2470/. CC-BY-NC. The views expressed on this post are tentative, personal and based on experience. This post resorts to some generalizations. The constraints of a blog post imply that not all required nuance can be effectively conveyed here. The actual context is complex and varied. Nevertheless, there are clear patterns pointing to the…

I hadn’t documented this here so here it goes. This academic year I also led the INM317 Design Justice module (2024-2025), MSc Human-Computer Interaction Design, City St George’s, University of London. Assessment includes a student group presentation and the creation of an individual design justice zine. Before students submit their zine, I made one myself, as a souvenir of their group…