Dr Nina Mickwitz

Biography

Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical Studies at University of the Arts London (UAL) and one of the founding members of the Comics Research Hub@ UAL.

My current research concerns social justice agendas across diverse genres of graphic storytelling. Social imaginaries provides a salient theoretical reference point for this project. As a comics scholar I am interested in questions of cultural hierarchies of value, and how popular culture provides a significant space for the reproduction and renegotiation of values and attitudes. Investigating and critically considering the roles played by aesthetics and storytelling conventions in works addressing a set of interconnected social justice themes and issues, my aim is to produce insights of value for readerships both within and beyond the field of Comics Studies. The work builds on previous in which I have written on comics and graphic novels doing documentary work, graphic narrative representations of refugees and as a tool for advocacy, and about transformative imaginaries in speculative fiction and fantasy comics. The latest project aims to develop and bring together these threads to consider how social justice storytelling often sits across operational, yet unstable and porous, delineations between factual/fictional storytelling and to examine how tropes, motifs and conventions shape such stories.

Another strand of my research has brought valuablre insight into entrepreneurial and precarious, often transnational, networks of creative producers.

Additional contributions to academic communities include regular peer reviews for academic journals and publishers and contributions to conferences in the UK and internationally, and I have also talked at public events.