Since the 1990s, comics and graphic narratives have emerged as an emphatic media form for exploring the embodied experiences of disability and identity (e.g., Alaniz, Chute, Czerwiec, Dolmage, and Refaie). To date, much scholarship has focused on Anglophone or Euro-American paradigms, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of how disability intersects with race, gender, class, and colonial histories in graphic narratives from diverse contexts. To bridge the gap, this seminar brings together international scholars from multiple disciplines (e.g., comics narratology and 4EA cognition, graphic medicine, posthumanist studies, history, and visual studies) to discuss both established and emerging works, especially those from the Global South. By identifying similarities and divergences in the works and analyses, the seminar advances the comparative methodologies for the study of disability studies and graphic narrative across geographies, languages, and traditions.

We invite papers that consider, among others, how contemporary comics and graphic narratives engage core concepts from disability studies (e.g., crip time; intimacy and care; interdependence and collective access; and disability networks or crip ecologies) to:

• Represent physical and/or cognitive impairments, embodied trauma, and historical memory in form, style, and narrative
• Depict disability/neurodiversity as an alternative embodied mode of knowing rather than deficit
• Uncover overlooked disability experiences of secondary, aging or non-superhero characters
• Critique social, political, and urban contexts
• Thematize (in)accessibility in both content and form
• Speculate on crip futurities
• Address structural violence, slow death, and debility in global and political contexts
• Resist diagnostic and pathological frames

Possible texts include transnational and multilingual comics and graphic narratives dealing with social and disability justice and intersectionality. These may range across South Korean manhwa; Brazilian graphic memoirs; graphic journalism; autobiographical comics by disabled artists; Latin American and Indigenous comics; Francophone bandes dessinées from West Africa and the Caribbean; and graphic narratives from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe. We also welcome discussions about webcomics, digital comics, and other emerging formats circulating across national and linguistic borders.

We look forward to proposals of analyses of texts from selected cultural, temporal, and spatial contexts. During the seminar, we will discuss the findings to derive new comparative frameworks about how disability and intersectionality shape global graphic narratives. The findings from the seminar promise to redefine and expand the critical horizons of comparative literature.