Abstract
The quest to understand my clinical, research and teaching practices through comics-based research is represented in this work, as a metanarrative. I am concerned with answering the following questions:1. What can a comics-based research methodology offer healthcare practitioner-researchers?
a. What form have comics-based research methods taken in my published works?
b. What role do comics have in practitioner-research?
c. What can the use of comics offer the practitioner-researcher and their audiences?
2. How has a comics-based research methodology offered innovative perspectives on clinical practice, leadership, and medical education?
I use a combination of words and images to tell the story of my research, by linking my version of the classic quest plot with a selection of my publications. I describe and critique the work of those who have influenced me, producing a comics-map of my interdisciplinary field. I am a consultant geriatrician, working in a service under pressure. I am expected to be a competent, compassionate clinician, leader and teacher. I intertwine influences of autoethnography and embodied experience of professional practice with the idea that art is research.
I describe how comics about healthcare practice exist within the field of Graphic Medicine. Graphic Medicine is a relatively new genre in comics, which is aligned to literary comics and graphic memoir, a community developing its own set of interpretative and evaluative expectations. I show how making comics is a way to step back and theorise about practice. I create comics as the lens through which my experience is refracted. I use autoethnographic comics to link the personal with the
sociopolitical, challenging the epistemological hierarchy in medicine, contributing to comics scholarship and practitioner research.
I set out how comics offer a rich vocabulary of narrative, visual metaphor, reported speech, reported thoughts, emotion, and reflexivity, making them an excellent method for research into healthcare practice. Comics are quick and humorous; they allow arts-based researchers to connect with audiences, sometimes challenging cultural norms in an exploratory and open way. Giving a platform to marginalised people through comics-based research could be a powerful tool for social change within healthcare.
My work using comics offers innovative perspectives on healthcare leadership, allowing the identification of the emotional life of teams and subversion of institutional norms. In clinical education and research supervision, comics-making enables transgression of the expected student/teacher boundaries, allowing learners to gain new insights into their practice. Comics are not only about seeing the clinical world in a different way; they are also about actively reconstructing a story to make it meaningful. In this way, comics have changed the way I think about practice. In fact, I argue that making art is what enables me to keep practising as a doctor.
| Date of Award | Oct 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Philippa Lyon (Supervisor) & Jayne Lloyd (Supervisor) |