What comics can teach us about sociological writin
Comic strips are widely used to spread scientific knowledge to larger audiences. While they have been harnessed in several initiatives to popularize sociology, there is room to increase the collaboration between the two disciplines. Indeed, in social sciences, the comic strip can be considered a specific form of writing, comparable to and substitutable for classical text writing. Going beyond popularization, attempts to create a genuine drawn sociology become possible. Based on an experiment in which ethnographic observations were transcribed in a comic strip, the article describes how changing the medium used in reporting an investigation requires that the researcher make adaptations, whether it is as the author (new writing rules) or reader (required to decipher unusual information). By upsetting both writing and reading habits, the use of comic strips in scholarly texts therefore allows major reflexivity gains in each of the research’s steps (data collection, analysis and reporting). More generally, this experiment raises questions regarding the interest of researchers in taking on the narrative dimension of their academic texts, particularly to ensure the understanding (and therefore evaluation) of their peers.