La graphic medicine come spazio eterotopico. Rappresentare e ripensare il reale nella ricerca sociale

This article proposes to read comics as heterotopic spaces capable of representing and, at the same time, producing social knowledge. Starting from the process of legitimation of the medium and its hybrid verbo-visual status, the paper shows how graphic sequentiality and the spatialization of narrative generate heterochronies and configurations of meaning that challenge the linear registers of academic writing. The adoption of a Foucauldian paradigm allows the interpretation of comic panels as “counter-sites” in which time, space, and social relations are suspended and reorganized, bringing to the fore marginal voices and counter-narratives. On a political and educational level, comics function as a cultural technology of critique, fostering processes of reflexivity, visual literacy, and the redistribution of epistemic authority within research and pedagogical contexts. Graphic Medicine constitutes a paradigmatic case: through pathographies and situated narratives, comics render vulnerability and uncertainty in care visible, dismantling dominant stereotypes and metaphors.