New Mexico State University will host a talk by Sherine Hamdy from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 24 in the Conroy Honors Center commons room. The event is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by multiple NMSU departments including anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, art, Creative Media Institute, deans of the College of Arts & Sciences and Honors College.
“Hamdy will invite us to rethink the possibilities for how we represent academic scholarship and how we can reach a wider audience. It is an opportunity to educate faculty and students about this non-traditional and creative form of representing research. As scholars, we usually represent data and the knowledge we produce in articles or books. However, we can also represent our scholarship in visual art or, in this case, in a graphic novel. This is another form of scholarship dissemination made accessible to a wider audience,” said Manal Hamzeh, gender and sexuality studies professor.
Hamdy is a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine and editor of the EthnoGRAPHIC anthropological graphic novel series. Hamdy recently published the graphic novel “Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution.” The book is the 2018 recipient of the PROSE Award in Cultural Anthropology & Sociology, which is awarded annually by the Association of American Publishers for the best book, journal or electronic content in professional and academic publishing in 58 categories.
“Hamdy’s presentation will be like a door opener for many students and faculty. They all need to see models of academics who are doing this creative work using an alternative medium of expression and knowledge dissemination. Hopefully, they will be intrigued and figure out a way of representing their scholarship in graphic form. Hamdy will provide them with evidence that graphic forms of representation are publishable and academically acknowledged,” said Hamzeh.