Looking on the Dark and Bright Side: Creative Metaphors of Depression in Two Graphic Memoirs

Refaie, Elisabeth El

doi:10.1080/08989575.2014.921989

Cited by 38 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The use of images and visual metaphors in health comics, in particular, their social and emotional impacts, is a topic in need of greater exploration. Metaphors allow us ‘to understand abstract areas of our lives in terms of more concrete and embodied experiences’ . Many of the metaphors in the comics used in this study represented conventional cultural metaphors in a graphic form, for example illness as a fight or as a burden, which interviewees could recognise and empathise with.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The potential of educational comics as a health information medium

McNicol

2016

Health Info Libraries J

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ObjectivesTo investigate ways in which educational comics might provide support in dealing with feelings and attitudes towards health conditions, as well as improving understanding of factual information and to identify potential weakness of comics as a medium for health information.MethodsSemi‐structured interviewees with eleven university students who either had a mental or physical health condition themselves or had a family member with a health condition.ResultsThe result highlighted the potential value of comics as a format for health information. In addition to conveying factual information, comics offer opportunities for self‐awareness, reassurance, empathy, companionship and a means to explore the impact of illness on family relationships. However, there are notable barriers to the greater use of comics to provide health information, namely, a lack of awareness of, and easy access to, educational comics, along with the perception that comics are exclusively light‐hearted and for children.ConclusionsCurrently, the full potential of comics in health settings is not being realised. Health information professionals may be in a position to address this issue through identifying, cataloguing, indexing and promoting comics as a legitimate format for health information.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The potential of educational comics as a health information medium

McNicol

2016

Health Info Libraries J

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“…The variety of studies shows that metaphor research as a way to model change in communication is widespread in our discipline. While some researchers study metaphor at a microlevel, for example, by studying personal memoirs (e.g., El Refaie, ; Fixsen, 2016), others study how important societal topics like the financial crisis or the EU are metaphorically described, explained, and legitimized (e.g., Musolff, ; Nerghes et al, ). As different as these approaches are, most of them start from one of the basic premises of CMT (Lakoff & Johnson, ): that metaphors are an integral aspect of thought.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In analyses of natural language data, communication scholars have used data from different types of sources. To give some examples: Scholars interested in microlevel processes have used unpublished personal memoirs (Fixsen, 2016), published autobiographical memoirs (El Refaie, 2014), or online data (e.g., web forums; Bates, 2015;Hellsten, 2003) as case studies to be analyzed. Scholars interested in mesolevel processes have used organizational documents (Cheng & Ho, in press;Tourish & Hargie, 2012).…”

Section: Change In Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualizing Change in Communication Through Metaphor

Burgers

2016

J Commun

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Modeling communication patterns by individuals and organizations dealing with institutional and social change is an important challenge for communication scholars. Metaphors provide frames of thinking about societal topics. The ways metaphors change can thus reveal how conceptualizations of social topics change over time. Change occurs in two temporal paces: evolutionary (continuous) or revolutionary (discontinuous). Furthermore, change occurs in two ways: through incremental (meaning of extant metaphors change) or fundamental (old metaphors are replaced) transformation. I propose that studying shifts of metaphors can be used to model incremental and fundamental change in communication at both evolutionary and revolutionary pace. I describe how such shifts have been studied on the microlevel, mesolevel, and macrolevel through both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

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“…Then the women were introduced to the concept of visual metaphor and invited to draw their experience of infertility and its effect on their relationships by representing it visually first as a creature or animal, then as a place or situation, and finally as a weather condition. These source domains were chosen on the basis of their prevalence both in Knight’s work and in other comics by both Western and non-Western creators dealing with physical or mental ill-health (see, e.g., El Refaie, 2014, 2015). The workshop ended with a free drawing session, which allowed the participants to produce a large-scale drawing of any aspect of their infertility experience in any form they chose.…”

Section: Case Study: Data and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pictorial and spatial metaphor in the drawings of a culturally diverse group of women with fertility problems

Refaie

Payson

Guevara

et al. 2018

Visual Communication

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Metaphor has been shown to be pervasive in the way people talk and write about a whole range of diseases, including infertility. Indeed, some of the most conventional of these metaphorical expressions have become so entrenched in particular discourse communities that they are used unconsciously and automatically, even by people who do not, in fact, agree with their underlying ideological implications. As the authors argue in this article, eliciting visual metaphors in the form of drawings may reveal the meaning-making processes of individuals in a way that more richly reflects their unique experiences, including those that challenge or disrupt dominant cultural models. Based on an analysis of drawings created by a group of women in Wales from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, the authors show the importance of taking into account both explicit pictorial metaphors and any metaphorical meanings suggested by spatial composition, as well as the specific socio-cultural context in which they were created.

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Looking on the Dark and Bright Side: Creative Metaphors of Depression in Two Graphic Memoirs

Cited by 38 publications

References 37 publications

The potential of educational comics as a health information medium

The potential of educational comics as a health information medium

Conceptualizing Change in Communication Through Metaphor

Pictorial and spatial metaphor in the drawings of a culturally diverse group of women with fertility problems

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