Runaway Poetics

: Mapping Histories of Migration through Comics but not Only

Abstract

“‘One is not born a migrant but is becoming one’” (Trimboli, 2022, p. 937).

As the word migration remains as politically charged and societally divisive as ever, interest in migration histories has risen. Comics have responded positively, with graphic histories and historical non-fiction proliferating. Instead of using comics merely to illustrate historical figures and events, however, this PhD deploys “Comics-Based Research”, as a deeply embodied form of historical investigation, as a process of witnessing across time and space that allows for the reporting of fresh perspectives on the past, and as a multi-layered, intergenerational output capable of intervening in wider academic debates on history and historiography. Expanding the scope of academic comics studies, often approached through a philological or narratological perspective, comics-based research, a methodology still in development, occupies a distinctively rebellious space—one that deviates from established disciplinary boundaries, conventions, and assumptions. In line with such progressive shifts, by bridging traditionally separate modes of knowledge and forms of practice, I conceptualise and experiment with a unique, multi-modal form that I term comics-as-maps-as-poetry. In examining the trio’s versatile and innovative visual storytelling potential, the PhD offers a new spatio-temporal process for unearthing, representing, and disseminating histories of migration. I draw on comics-as-maps-as-poetry as an interdisciplinary method that encompasses studies of archival documents, practice-based explorations, and public history, where various individuals and publics were invited to participate in interpreting the historical past. Following a case study approach, creative responsibility, authority, and agency were shared through the democratic outlook of socially engaged comics co-creation. Drawing on the land, the sea, and the in-between, the research resulted in three graphic narratives and associated public history exhibitions. What is Home: Arriving and Departing explored the local and immigrant oral histories of present-day Wellingborough, UK. Think in Your Heart, Think… Machar Colony, Statelessness, and the Search for Belonging examined the legacies of Pakistan’s Partition in the mid-twentieth century. … and all yesterdays have the way… responded to histories of eighteenth century forced colonial migration and enslavement in Benjamin Franklin House, London, UK. All three tell untold tales of, about, and with migration, for,

“the twenty-first century will be the age of the migrant” (Nail in Wilson, 2021, p. 261) and every year will be “The Year of the Runaways” (Wilson, 2021, p. 261).

Date of Award	2 Sept 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Oliver Gruner (Supervisor), Louis Netter (Supervisor) & Marius Kwint (Supervisor)