CRITICAL CONVERSATIONS - Public Sequential Art and Public Scholarship

Conversation with Sergio C. Figueiredo, Assistant Professor of Social/Digital Media at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Prof. Figueiredo will discuss a historical continuum of artistry of comics (sequential art) as a public art designed to engage in public deliberative discourse, as well as how the early theoretical grounding of the form. Initially, this discussion will address Rudolphe Töpffer’s reflections on the rhetorical function of image/text interplay and it’s design as a pedagogical practice—informed by his simultaneous study of the fine arts (with his father) and the Greek classics (in Paris)—before addressing contemporary views of comics as an everyday art accessible to the general public.

The discussion will then lead into a proposal for an extended public art practice afforded by contemporary digital technologies. One example of such a practice is Özge Samanci’s GPS Comics, which prompts ‘readers’ to use mobile technologies to navigate through a city in order to access the next ‘panel’ in the narrative. Paired with Amy D. Propen’s proposal that the combination of visual and material rhetorics offer the ability to shape lived and embodied experience that can help to inform advocacy for public policy decision.

In conclusion, he will point to The Virtual Education Project, developed in collaboration with Lydia Ferguson of Auburn University, that works at the intersection of contemporary rhetorical theory, networked media practices, and deliberative discourse.

BIO: Sergio C. Figueiredo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Kennesaw State University. His research and teaching interests are in rhetorical theory, media histories and rhetorics (print, digital, and material), comics and games, composition theory and practice, public engagement, and writing studies writ large. What connects this broad range of interests is a focus writing practices across available and emerging communication technologies, and the rhetorical methods and practices.