How to do Social Research with Comics

This chapter is about ways to insert drawing and comics organically in social analysis, ways in which a research project can be informed from the beginning by the specific affordances of drawing and comics as narrative drawings. That is, how the specificity of narrative drawing – sequential drawings in combination with words, including a narrative dimension and a spatial unfolding highlighting a relational dimension – can inform a whole project. In particular, how its display of the tension between verbal and visual narration, between object-based and relation- or practice-based logic can be used not only in gathering research material and developing rapport with research participants, or in engaging the audience, but also from the very beginning when formulating a problem or question, as well as in analysis and giving shape to interpretation.