Comics As a Tool for Research on Gender Violence. Interview With Nayanika Mookherjee on the Graphic Novel Birangona. Towards Ethical Testimonies of Sexual Violence During Conflict (2019)

Abstract

Comics and the recently emerged graphic novel format are among the art forms that researchers have chosen to disseminate and provide a visual representation of their work. This relationship between comics and research, which is part of a practice labelled as “arts-based research”, has been facilitated by comics’ recognised narrative and didactic abilities. Research on gender-based violence has not been deaf to the call of comics art, and, in some rare but interesting cases, it has exploited the features of the medium to visualise and circulate research findings. An example is the graphic novel Birangona (Mookherjee & Najmun Nahar, 2019 Durham University), authored by the researcher Nayanika Mookherjee and by the comics artist Najmun Nahar Keya, which was circulated, both in an online and paper version, with the aim of popularizing a set of guidelines on how to conduct oral history data collection with survivors of wartime rape. This interview with Professor Nayanika Mookherjee, the co-author of the graphic novel and the anthropologist who conducted the research with wartime rape testimonies from which the guidelines were taken, has the objective of presenting the arts-based research project Birangona and discussing, in a scholarly fashion, the implementation of visual arts methodologies (and comics-based methodologies in particular) to research gender violence.