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Affective/Effective Images? The Aesthetics of Representing Disability Experiences in Comics Ms Gesine Wegner, TU Dresden Date: Wednesday 7 March, 2018 Time: 2.00pm–3.30pm Place: EDEN 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK Over the past decade graphic illness and disability narratives have begun not only to receive recognition from literary critics and academics but also to spark an unprecedented interest in comics by health professionals. Coined by Ian Williams as ‘graphic medicine’, a new interdisciplinary field of research has been established by scholars such as Michael Green and Kimberly Meyers. This field of graphic medicine no longer focuses on a therapeutic utilization of comics but sheds light on pathography’s (potential) function within medical education, patient care, and the social critique of the medical profession. In this seminar Ms Wegner will analyze the aesthetics that underlie graphic narratives of illness and disability. Among other things, she aims to question the ocularcentrism that takes effect whenever visual modes of storytelling are privileged in order to create emotional and thus supposedly meaningful responses to disability. Gesine Wegner is a junior lecturer and PhD student at the TU Dresden in Germany. With Tanja Reiffenrath she is guest editor of a special issue of COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies. Her article on the representation of physically disabled women in American medical dramas was published by the Leipziger Universitätsverlag in 2016. She was Visiting CCDS Scholar in 2016; presenter and chair at Disability and Disciplines in 2017; and author of a JLCDS comment in 2017. This seminar is part of the CCDS series, Disability and the Emotions. Other dates include: 18 Apr 2018, Crip Feelings/Feeling Crip, Brady Forrest. 23 May 2018, Remembering the Great War through Bodies and Emotions: The Experience of Disabled Ex Servicemen between the Two World Wars, Ugo Pavan Dalla Torre. 04 Jul 2018, Demanding Money with Menaces: Fear and Loathing in the Archipelago of Confinement, Owen Barden. For further information please contact Prof David Bolt