Experimenting with Comics Making as Inquiry

I illustrate my comics making approach for the extension of multimodal analysis (MMA) in ethnographic education research. Comics making impacted how I designed my study, generated multimodal data, conducted analysis, and share work to broader academic audiences. I present two examples drawn from my ethnography of an image-based lab’s graduate course to show how comics making (1) foregrounded corporeal responsiveness over time; (2) unified the visual and textual with body-sensory perception; (3) emphasized movement, affect, and empathy; and (4) enabled the use of multimodal data generated by research participants and myself. I also provide resources for scholars who are interested in making comics for their research.