Graphic medicine (GM) has increasingly become an important methodological resource in medical/health humanities (MHH), offering innovative ways to research, teach and communicate experiences of health, disability (including old age and illnesses) and care. While existing scholarship has examined GM in terms of illness representation, this seminar spotlights comics-based practices as methods of inquiry, collaboration and knowledge production. By posing GM as method, it explores how visual storytelling expands both theoretical and practical possibilities in MHH. In addition, we will address linguistic, cultural, historical and geopolitical differences to account for the rapid global growth of GM and underscore how comparative studies and GM mutually expand their analytical methods.

Following the definition of GM as comics with "some sort of therapeutic potential" (Williams, "What Is Graphic Medicine?"), GM is understood as a critical, aesthetic and collaborative practice through which medical knowledge, lived experience and cultural understandings of health are produced, negotiated and contested. We welcome discussions of genres such as graphic memoirs and reportage, educational comics and public health campaigns, therapeutic comics workshops, graphic narratives created through and for participatory research, web- and digital comics, and other visual narratives about health-related experiences. We especially encourage papers that examine GM as both representation and practice: a means of producing knowledge, fostering advocacy, building communities and imagining more equitable forms of care. The seminar welcomes scholars working across disciplines, artists, disability advocates, educators and healthcare practitioners whose work engages GM in clinical, educational or community contexts.

Possible questions include:

• How can GM function as a method of inquiry, pedagogy and knowledge production in MHH?
• What methodological possibilities emerge when comics-making, visual analysis and narrative practices are incorporated into MHH research?
• How do participatory GM practices redistribute authority between researchers, healthcare providers and communities with lived experiences of disability?
• What can visual storytelling contribute to forms of care, advocacy and medical education that conventional methods cannot?
• What opportunities and challenges do AI-assisted approaches pose to MHH methodologies that use GM for research, education and care?

The seminar will consist of twenty-minute papers followed by discussion. By placing GM into dialogue across languages, healthcare systems, political contexts and visual traditions, the seminar develops comparative methodologies that create new collaborative forms while attending to visual form, embodiment, translation and cultural difference. In doing so, it aims to strengthen connections between comparative literature, GM, MHH and disability justice, thus opening new avenues for interdisciplinary and transnational research.