Law, Comics, Justice – Graphic Justice Research Alliance Annual Conference

The Graphic Justice Research Alliance is a multidisciplinary research network exploring the crossover between law and justice and comics of all kinds. Comics and graphic fiction represent a growing area of research, are of huge significance to questions of law and justice within society and culture, on many levels:

• On the level of culture, comics are historically embroiled in debates of free speech whilst today they inspire countless pop culture adaptations to television and cinema and can be seen to reflect and shape popular visions of justice, morality and law.
• On the level of content, from mainstream superhero narratives tackling overt issues of justice, governance and authority, to countless themes related to morality, justice and human value in stories beyond the mainstream, comics are replete with legally and morally relevant material.
• On the level of form, comics’ unique and restless blending of different media and types of representation (text, image, visuality, aesthetics, amongst others) radically opens up discourse beyond the confines of text, enabling greater critical engagement amidst our increasingly visual age. 
• On the level of production, comics are a complex art-form, with multiple creators working in individual, group, commercial and industrial contexts, raising questions of ownership and exploitation.

In short, comics bring rich cultural, practical and aesthetic contexts and mediations to long-standing and emerging legal problems and settings.

 

The Graphic Justice Research Alliance (GJRA) is delighted to announce a call for papers for its annual conference at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY to be held October 20, 2018.