Call for Abstract Proposals 

Athens, 7 October 2020. It is a pleasantly sunny day, early noon. It is also a historical moment: after nearly ten years of court proceedings, twenty thousand people have gathered in front of the Court of Appeal to hear the verdict of a trial. Then, finally, the moment arrives as the loudspeakers announce: “Golden Dawn constitutes a criminal organization” and a cry encompassing both euphoria and relief waves through the crowd. 

Encapsulated in this historical moment are years of efforts by lawyers, human rights activists, NGOs and victims of violence perpetrated by Golden Dawn, as well as relatives of those whose lives were cut short by their violence, to arrive at the verdict. The mobilization of the crowds on that November day was the result of multiple activist strategies, including those that made use of comics. In collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Greece, over fifty comics artists contributed to the project X Them Out! A Black Map of Athens by documenting incidents perpetrated by the Golden Dawn through cartoons, which were digitally mapped and circulated in different forms. The affective response that this multimedia project called for, while documenting violent incidents of the past and courtroom proceedings in the present, indicates the power of comics to engender new ways of seeing and of remembering political contention.

From graphic biographies detailing the lives of prominent revolutionaries, to graphic histories of entire social movements, comics contribute to the cultural memory of activism. In smaller or more immediate formats, like the Black Map of Athens, comics have been used to raise awareness and campaign for social justice. They recollect into their boxes moments which escape documentation in more conventional archives, mediating recent memories and providing scaffolding for new understandings of the past to make sense. Comics both mediate historic historic activism, protests and other instances of political contention, and act as carriers of memory with activist intent.

This special collection invites interdisciplinary researchers to discuss and consider: how do hybrid image-text forms foster critical literacies, interpellate politically-engaged readers and mediate individual or collective memories of civil disobedience across page and screen?

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Individual Memory and Activist Practices, Generations of Memory: remembering activist lives through comics; remembering social movements through comics; comics used in/for activism; comics and activist archives (including digital and networked archives, amateur and professional, illicit and sanctioned, personal and official, and past and present);
• Collective Imaginaries: visual content across types and scales of remembering; icons; flashbulb memories; visual metaphors; non-narrative images; formations of memory (including mind, body, group, individual, social, cultural, public and multitude);
• Mediation (form, content, practice): the role of comics layout, format and genres in mediating and remembering activism; remediation and premediation; materiality and comics form; media ecologies, archaeologies and futures; multimodality; the senses and perception;
• Contexts: publication, circulation and readership within specific activist publishing landscapes and/or subcultures; republications and recirculations in different contexts; circulation of comics beyond print media (e.g. digital comics, online platforms, museums, performances); comics used to consolidate political belonging and/or solidarity;
• Comics as Tools for Education: the transformative experience of reading/making comics; emerging practices that use comic drawing/writing as a research method in understanding memory and activism.

Timeline and procedure

MMM has a rolling submission window. Special collections do not have a finite number of pages and/or contributions. Rather, contributions are accepted on the basis of relevance to the topic and quality. The special collection will not be published as a whole, but each contribution in the collection will flow through the peer review process as soon as possible. The collection will therefore emerge over a period of months and each contribution will be promoted separately.

500 to 700 word abstracts should be sent to mmm.comicsmemoryactivism@gmail.com by 30 September, 2024, or sooner. The abstract should include: 1) the topic discussed and the research question(s) to be answered, 2) the methodological or critical framework used, 3) the expected findings or conclusions and, 4) academic and/or societal relevance.

Decisions will be communicated to authors in early October 2024.

Full invited contributions to be submitted by 28 February 2025.

In addition to traditional research articles, we encourage critical design interventions, software, digital art, and design fictions. Also the journal facilitates photography and video content, such as video essays or collages. We particularly welcome contributions in the form of comics.

Feel free to consult with the Special Collection Editors about your article ideas and potential angles or approaches.

Invited paper submissions can be submitted directly to the submissions portal for Memory, Mind & Media: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mmm where they will undergo peer review following the usual procedures of Memory, Mind & Media. The invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee acceptance into the Special Collection. The individual articles for this Special Collection will be published usually within two months following completion of successful peer review.

Special Collection Editors:

Vasiliki Belia Maastricht University/Utrecht University

Kristina Gedgaudaitė University of Amsterdam

Clara Vlessing Utrecht University/Radboud University, Nijmegen 

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This publication is supported by the project Redrawing Feminism: Graphic Narrative Engagements with the Feminist Past, which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101067507