Comics and Social Justice

Monday March 18 // 4:30 PM // Porter Hall 100

In recent years, the work of comics studies scholars, as well as widely publicized examples of politicized comics, has confirmed the medium's aptitude for encouraging critical dialogue and political engagement. This talk will provide overviews and analyses of three German-language comics that approach issues of identity in contemporary Germany. Through a variety of narrative techniques and visual tools, which will be analyzed more closely in the talk, the comics artists consider issues of voice, identity, dominant culture, and traces of colonialism awakened by shifts in definitions of German national identity and the German cultural landscape as a result of mass migration.

Lynn M. Kutch is professor of German at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches all levels of German courses as well a First Year Seminar course dealing with Global Citizenship. Additionally, she is the newly named Coordinator of Undergraduate Research and Creativity at KU. Her research interests have focused on German crime fiction, representations of the European refugee crisis in art and pop culture, and comics studies. Her article on teaching a graphic version of Kafka's Metamorphosis won the AATG's Unterrichtspraxis Best Article Prize for 2015. She also published the collected volume Novel Perspectives on German-language Graphic Novels: History, Pedagogy, Theory in 2016. She is a co-founder and co-coordinator of the German Studies Association's Comics Studies Network.