Parables of Care at The 2nd International Amsterdam Comics Conference

By Ernesto Priego.

Amsterdam Comics logo

 

On Saturday 17th November Simon Grennan will present on Parables of Care at The 2nd International Amsterdam Comics Conference, “Drawing Yourself In and Out of It”, 15-17h November, 2018 at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

In a follow-up to our presentation at The First USW Cardiff: Comics Symposium last June, Simon will discuss further the creation of the comic Parables of Care: creative responses to dementia care, in terms of hypotactic correspondences of form, emotional ambiguity and story.

Amsterdam Comics aims to further the interaction between the academic study of comics and its practice.

Comprised of parallel panel sessions, keynote lectures, and a roundtable discussion, the conference aims to encourage interdisciplinary connections between comics scholars from various disciplines, comics artists, publishers, and cultural workers from museums and other heritage sites.

The conference schedule and other relevant information can be found here.

 

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Parables of Care is a project of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, The University of Chester, UK, and Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.

Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18245/.

If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

Parables of Care at The First USW Cardiff: Comics Symposium- Creating Comics, Creative Comics

By Ernesto Priego.

Creating Comics, Creative Comics

Creating Comics, Creative Comics is a 2-day academic symposium taking place on Friday June 1st & Saturday June 2nd 2018 at the University of South Wales, Cardiff.

Simon Grennan and Ernesto Priego will make a presentation on Saturday (panel 4) on the work done with Peter Wilkins et al on the Parables of Care project.

The title of the presentation is “Hypotactic correspondences between Yonkoma four panel manga, emotional ambiguity and story, in styling and drawing the comic Parables of Care: creative responses to dementia care (2018)”.

We will have hard copies of the Parables of Care comic to distribute freely.

The First USW Cardiff: Comics Symposium is interested in creator’s perspectives. It will explore comics and creativity and will examine the practice of creating comics, and the particulars of storytelling in comics.

Does changing a panel, change the story? How might a medium’s materiality affect its construction and reception? How do the theoretical and philosophical objectives of the maker inform and frame the construction of the works?

This symposium addresses these needs from the point of view of the creators involved in the production and creation of comics.

Symposium Schedule

Friday 1st June

09:30 Symposium Registration: Registration Desk, The Street, Atrium

10:30 Symposium Welcome with FCI Deputy Dean, Huw Swayne

10:45 PANEL 1 ~ Philosophy, Communicating Concepts
Dr Peter Hodges, The Last Temptation: A Consideration of the Role of Sound in Comics
Xiyuan Tan, Guoxue Comics: Visualising Philosophical Concepts and Cultural Values Through Sequential Narrative
Ian Hornsby, UCOs, or Beyond the Marriage of Philosophy and Sequential Storytelling
Dr Nathan Kilburn, Practice as Research: The Visual Aphorism
Chair: Corrado Morgana

12:30 LUNCH

13:30 WORKSHOP
Chris Phillips, Creating Comics – 5 Page Red Riding Hood
With Geraint D’Arcy

14:30 PANEL 2 ~ Perception and Re/presentation
Jeannette D’Arcy, Creating Canon: Fun Home and Transmedial Adaptation
Dr Robert Hagan, Touch Me/Don’t Touch: Female Archetypes in Ann Nocenti’s Daredevil
Chair: Madelon Hoedt

15:30 KEYNOTE
Dr Julia Round, Anonymous Authors, Invisible Illustrators, and Collaborative Creation: Misty and British Girls’ Comics

Saturday 2nd June

09:15 DAY 2 Welcome

09:30 PANEL 3 ~ Practice-As-Research
Dr Paul Davies, New Choices of the Comics Creator
Ahmed Jameel, Studying Writer-Artist Comics Collaboration: A Practice Based-Approach
Dr John Miers, Fortuitous Realism at Work and Play: The Role of Imaginative Projection in Developing a Cartooning Practice
Chair: Brian Fagence

11:00 PANEL 4 ~ Comics, Parables of Care and the Medical Self
Tony Pickering, Diabetes Year One: Drawing my pathography: comics, poetry and the medical self.
Dr Enesto Priego, Dr Simon Grennan and Dr Peter Wilkins, Hypotactic correspondences between Yonkoma four panel manga, emotional ambiguity and story, in styling and drawing the comic Parables of Care: creative responses to dementia care (2018).
Chair: Emily Underwood-Lee

12:00 LUNCH

13:00
CICE PRACTITIONER PANEL
Jon Davis-Hunt and Rob Williams
With Brian Fagence

14:00 PANEL 5 ~ History, Memoir and Autoethnography
Nick Dodds, Reframing the Graphic Memoir: How can the comic-strip artist negotiate modality and fidelity in the depiction of personal and historical narratives?
Dr Simon Grennan, Drawing in Drag: self-observation, the dissenting subject and stylistic reformation in the production of a new pseudonymous comic album
Chair: Geraint D’Arcy

15:00 ROUND TABLE / PLENARY

15:30 SYMPOSIUM END

*In association with Cardiff Indie Comic Expo. Registration for the symposium grants entry to CICE Saturday 2nd June.

Registration link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creating-comics-creative-comics-tickets-45194337480

ardiff Indie Comic Expo logo

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Parables of Care is a project of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, The University of Chester, UK, and Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.

Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18245/.

If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

Presentation at HCID Open Day 2018: On Comics and Collaborative Art Practice as a Human-Computer Interaction Methodology

By Ernesto Priego.

The HCID Open Day 2018 is a mini conference on Friday 4th May run by the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design (HCID) at City, University of London.

The theme for this year will be ‘Beyond the Screen’ and will focus on designing non screen based interactions, exploring technology that has made the jump from science fiction into reality and how UX thinking can be used for more than just interfaces.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hcid-open-day-2018-beyond-the-screen-tickets-44666147650

Hashtags:  ;

Dr Ernesto Priego, as drawn by Jason Mathis (2013)

Dr Ernesto Priego will present at the HCID Open Day 2018 on Friday 4th May at City, University of London as part of the knowledge exchange and impact activities around the Parables of Care project. The presentation is titled “Meaningful Patterns: Comics and Collaborative Art Practice as HCI Research.”

Recent research has explored the use of collaborative art practice as a Human-Computer Interaction methodology (Kang et al 2014 and 2018; Benford et al 2013; Brynjarsdyttir et al 2013). In this talk I will describe how the Parables of Care project is employing collaborative comics-making as a user-centred methodology as a means to collect and disseminate data, reflect, design and propose strategies for dementia care.

Ernesto Priego is a lecturer at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London and the Editor of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship.

Ernesto has worked in partnership with Dr Simon Grennan of the University of Chester, Dr Peter Wilkins of Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada, an NHS Trust, and colleagues from HCID, leading the team to produce Parables of Care, that uses comics as a medium to evoke the kind of de-structured and re-structured experience of time that is akin to dementia, to illness, ageing and caring.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hcid-open-day-2018-beyond-the-screen-tickets-44666147650

Hashtags: ;

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Parables of Care is a project of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, The University of Chester, UK, and Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.

Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18245/.

If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

Public Lecture on How Comics can Bring Benefits to Dementia Care at the University of Chester

By Ernesto Priego.

A public lecture, exploring how comics and taking an artistic approach can bring benefits to dementia care, will be held at the University of Chester.

Tickets are free, but need to be booked in advance. To reserve a place, visit https://parablesofcare.eventbrite.co.uk

Dr Simon Grennan during one of the Parables of Cares workshops, 22 March 2017, City, University of London

Dr Simon Grennan during one of the Parables of Cares workshops, 22 March 2017, City, University of London

Held as part of the University’s 2018 Research Festival 2018, Dr Simon Grennan will describe the making of the 2017 comic book Parables of Care, which presents a creative response to dementia care, as told by carers themselves.

The lecture will take place on Thursday, April 12, from 6.30pm to 7.30pm in room CBK107 in the Binks Building on the University’s Parkgate Road Campus.

The book includes 14 informative and touching stories, which were adapted by more than 100 case studies of real-life dementia care found at http://carenshare.city.ac.uk.

Simon worked with partners from London City University, Douglas College Vancouver and the NHS to produce the new book.

The lecture will illuminate the specific opportunities arising in adapting the case studies as drawings, including the use of ambiguity and emotion in a clinical context.

Dr Simon Grennan, is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Art and Design at the University. He is an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist, comics scholar and author of over 40 comics and artists’ books.

Simon worked in partnership with Dr Ernesto Priego of City, University of London; Dr Peter Wilkins of Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada and an NHS Trust, to produce Parables of Care.

Tickets are free, but need to be booked in advance. To reserve a place, visit https://parablesofcare.eventbrite.co.uk

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Source text from: https://www.chester.ac.uk/node/42363

Parables of Care at the Western Canada Health Science Educators Conference 2018

By Ernesto Priego.

 Building Bridges: Working together for SAFER patient care

Dr Peter Wilkins and Marie-Pier Caron of Douglas College will present on the Parables of Care project at the Western Canada Health Science Educators conference in Parksville, British Columbia, May 17-18 2018.

The theme of the conference is “Building Bridges: Working Together for SAFER Patient Care”, and the title of their presentation is “Drawing Dementia Care: A Comics and Healthcare Initiative at Douglas College.”

Peter and Marie will focus on interdisciplinary approaches to healthcare, particularly representing and sharing experiences and best practices of dementia care through the intersections between art, art theory, and healthcare practices.  You can read an update on their ongoing work here.

This presentation will will focus on interdisciplinary approaches to healthcare, particularly representing and sharing experiences and best practices of dementia care through the intersections between art, art theory, and healthcare practices.

It will discuss the project at Douglas College to adapt experiences and best practices of dementia care into comic book form as part of a larger, international Graphic Medicine project that originated at City, University of London in 2016.

The presentation will discuss the project at Douglas College to adapt experiences and best practices of dementia care into comic book form as part of a larger, international Graphic Medicine project that originated at City, University of London in 2016 where comics scholars Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego, and Peter Wilkins worked with the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City to adapt stories caregivers had submitted to the Care ‘n’ Share app to produce Parables of Care, a 16-page comic.

Peter and Marie have a Research Incentive Grant at Douglas to work with focus groups and individuals from across health sciences and therapeutic recreation departments to gather stories for a similarly sized comic, which a team of student research assistants and an artist will adapt.

We will discuss the theorization of the project and its relation to the larger Graphic Medicine and Medical Humanities movements.

We are particularly interested in what comics can represent about the experiences of dementia care that other discourses cannot. Our hypothesis is that because dementia care involves working with different registers of rationality and emotion, the multimodal representation of comics offers a good medium for representing and exploring dementia.

We will present some sample pages and discuss the difficulties and successes of our work so far, and we will have print copies of Parables of Care for free distribution.

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Parables of Care is a project of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, The University of Chester, UK, and Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.
Parables of Care was edited and adapted by Dr Simon Grennan (University of Chester) Dr Ernesto Priego (City, University of London) and Dr Peter Wilkins (Douglas College), and was drawn by Dr Simon Grennan with Christopher Sperandio.

Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from

If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

Free Public Event: Whose Story? On How to Create Narratives of Dementia and the Self

By Ernesto Priego.

Free public event:

Whose Story? On how to create narratives of dementia and the self

Date and time: Wednesday 28 March 2018, 2:00PM

Location: City, University of London, Room A130, College Building Entrance (Map)

This panel brings together service users, health care professionals and artists who are working to support those with dementia to create narratives of self. Faced with challenges to a sense of ‘who you are’, and ‘who you might become’, our panellists explore how such concepts might be adapted or preserved through the process of storytelling.  This session is open to anyone who is either working in this area, caring for someone with dementia or living with the illness themselves.

The Panelists

Clare Allan (chair) lectures in creative writing at City, University of London. A former service user, she has written extensively on matters relating to mental health. Her novel, Poppy Shakespeare, a satire on mental health services, was short-listed for numerous awards, including Mind Book of the Year, the Guardian First Book Award and the Orange Prize for new writers. She writes a column for The Guardian on issues concerning mental health, which has been running since 2006.

Tracey Shorthouse, aged 48, is diagnosed with Posterior Cortical Atrophy and Early Onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. A retired community staff nurse, she is the author of I Am Still Me, a poetry collection and is involved with a variety of dementia projects and organisations such as Dementia UK’s Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP), Dementia Action Alliances (DAA),  the Dementia Engagement and Empowerment Project (DEEP) and The Angela Project.

Toby Williamson is an independent consultant working in the fields of adult and older people’s mental health, dementia, mental capacity, and safeguarding. He has many years’ experience of working in and managing frontline mental health services, research, evaluation, practice and service development, and policy work, and for the last ten years has particularly focused on dementia and the Mental Capacity Act. Toby has co-authored a book on mental health and mental capacity legislation and is currently co-authoring a book on rights, values and dementia.

Susanna Howard is a writer, actor and theatre maker who founded and runs the arts, literature & dementia charity Living Words.  Living Words run care home residency programmes working one-to-one with people experiencing dementias and the staff who work with them. Susanna is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Roehampton University Poetry Centre.

Ernesto Priego is a lecturer at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London and the Editor of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. Ernesto has worked in partnership with Dr Simon Grennan of the University of Chester, Dr Peter Wilkins of Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada, an NHS Trust, and colleagues from HCID, leading the team to produce Parables of Care, that uses comics as a medium to evoke the kind of de-structured and re-structured experience of time that is akin to dementia, to illness, ageing and caring. If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

The panel will be followed by a reception for all guests.

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Parables of Care is a project of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, The University of Chester, UK, and Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.

Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18245/.

If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

Meaningful Patterns Beginning to Emerge: Douglas College Parables of Care Update

By Ernesto Priego.

 

Parables of Care is a project of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, The University of Chester, UK, and Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada.

Peter Wilkins avatar. Art by Peter WilkinsWhat follows is a new update by Dr Peter Wilkins on the Canadian component of the project.

Peter is on Twitter at @wilkinspeter.

All links open in new browser windows.

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Research projects that depend on the participation of focus groups made up of volunteers are fickle things in my experience, and the Douglas College component of the Parables of Care project has been completely in line with that observation.

Our initial idea was to interview faculty and students in focus groups to find out how they have taught or been taught about dementia care. But because we demand time and offer no incentives to participate, response for calls to participate has been weak to say the least, particularly among students. This in spite of general enthusiasm for the project.

 

 Health science students are particularly busy; they have a demanding schedule. And faculty are perpetually run off their feet.

 

The issues as I see them are that health science students are particularly busy; they have a demanding schedule. Also, when it comes to dementia care, especially for those in the early stages of their programs, their experience may be limited. And faculty are perpetually run off their feet.

Nevertheless, we have not despaired because a rich seam of stories has revealed itself in place of the focus groups. Faculty and staff who have family members diagnosed with dementia have been eager to talk about their relationship to dementia, and in the case of health science faculty, to reflect on how their profession as caregiver relates to their family situation.

 

What we have learned is that dementia is a condition that affects the family network around the person with dementia as much if not more than the persons with dementia themselves. The emotional energies conflict with objective training. How close the familial relationship is to the person diagnosed with dementia means a lot. For example, in-laws appear to have an easier time than direct relatives.

 

What we have learned is that dementia is a condition that affects the family network around the person with dementia as much if not more than the persons with dementia themselves. The emotional energies conflict with objective training. Professional caregivers find themselves at a loss in some cases when dementia strikes a mother or a father.

The emotional energies conflict with objective training. How close the familial relationship is to the person diagnosed with dementia means a lot. For example, in-laws appear to have an easier time than direct relatives. The “responsible” family member who takes charge of the care of the person with dementia  often feels abandoned by and resentful towards other family members. Spousal relationships are strained as weekends get sucked up by visits and care.

 

Meaningful patterns are beginning to emerge, providing rich material for comics adaptation.

 

Of course, all this is qualitative and anecdotal. But while the sample size is terribly small, meaningful patterns are beginning to emerge, providing rich material for comics adaptation.

Below, I’ve included some sketches I did for one interview.

Sketch from an interview from the Douglas College Parables of Care project. Art by Peter Wilkins

Sketch from an interview from the Douglas College Parables of Care project. Art by Peter Wilkins

Sketch from an interview from the Douglas College Parables of Care project. Art by Peter Wilkins

Sketch from an interview from the Douglas College Parables of Care project. Art by Peter Wilkins

 

This comic will have a different form than Parables of Care; we are looking at something more confessional and intimate. I think it will allow people to identify with the narratives and to see themselves in them.

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This post was written by Dr Peter Wilkins and edited and published by Dr Ernesto Priego.

For a previous update on the Douglas College Parables of Care project, see https://blogs.city.ac.uk/parablesofcare/2017/11/09/parables-of-care-canada-moving-along/.

Parables of Care can be downloaded as a PDF file, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, from City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/18245/.

If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.