Explore the unique power of comics to address social justice issues.

Click here https://youtu.be/FUoLkC8wRoQ to view the recording of this program.

Comics offer a complex lens through which to see social justice issues, including racism, immigration, and gender discrimination, to name just a few. Some examples within the medium have perpetuated offensive stereotypes, for example Eisner’s Ebony White in The Spirit from the 1940s and Harvey Comics’ Shirl the Jungle Girl from the late 1950s. Others, such as John Lewis’s story in March (2013-2016) and Bitch Planet (2014-2017) from Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro, have challenged these same problematic images.

This talk explores the unique power of comics to address social justice issues of all types, by shining a spotlight on injustice and envisioning meaningful change.

Elizabeth Pollard is Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence at San Diego State University, where she has been teaching courses in Roman History, World History, and witchcraft studies since 2002. She co-leads the Comics @ SDSU collaborative (2019-present) and is co-Champion of Comics and Social Justice for the SDSU President’s Big Ideas Initiative (2020-present). Pollard recently debuted a new Comics and History course that explores sequential art from the paleolithic to the present day. Her primary research investigates women accused of witchcraft in the Roman world and explores the exchange of goods and ideas between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the early centuries of the Common Era. She is currently working on a graphic history exploring the influence of classical understandings of witchcraft on modern pop-culture representations of witches (from comics to film). Apart from her work on magic and comics, Pollard is co-author of Worlds Together Worlds Apart Concise, WTWA Full 6th edition, and the Worlds Together Worlds Apart, Companion Reader (W.W. Norton). She has also published on various pedagogical and digital history topics, including writing about witchcraft on Wikipedia, tweeting on the backchannel of the large lecture, and digital humanities approaches to visualizing Roman History.

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