Participating in ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Comics’ at Malmö University

I’m super excited to be taking part in the workshop “What We Talk About When We Talk About Comics: Towards a Metadiscourse for Comics Studies,” to be hosted at Malmö University, Sweden on May 3–5, 2026.

This invitation-only, in-person event brings together an international group of scholars to reflect on the methods, assumptions, and evolving conversations that shape the field of comics studies.

Sponsored by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), an independent foundation dedicated to supporting research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, this in-person workshop has been designed by Martin Lund as a space for collective reflection on comics studies, including its processes, practices, and inherent tensions.

I’ve been invited to respond to two position papers and to participate in the wider discussions across the workshop. I’ll be contributing to the “Authorship” panel on May 4.

Bringing together 35 scholars from across Europe, the UK, and North America, the workshop seeks to develop tools for meta-level reflection. It will explore how those of us who identify as comics scholars talk about our work, and how our differing approaches to what we call “comics” shape that work, informing what we consider our object of study, what we recognise as relevant data and how we handle it, as well as the kinds of questions we ask.

The workshop also seeks to consider how these perspectives influence our broader understanding of the field and its scope. As if that were not enough the workshop also aims to foster dialogue among scholars from diverse disciplines, career stages, and institutional contexts whose work engages with questions of method and theory in comics studies, as well as with the field’s conditions of possibility and its intellectual and institutional histories.

I’m looking forward to the workshop and collaborating again with friends and colleagues (some of whom I have not seen in person in a while) as we explore how we define, study, and talk about comics as a field.

I’m very grateful to Martin Lund for the kind invitation, and to Katja Ekman Bailiff for all the incredible assistance with travel arrangements.

Onwards!