Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.
Understanding Caregivers in Graphic Novel Memoirs
I have been a caregiver for a family member my entire life, and it has often been difficult to articulate my experience through words alone. My story is not unique, and many caregivers have harnessed the power of the graphic novel memoir to represent, affirm, and re-envision the experience of providing care. Spiegelman’s Maus (1986) and Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) legitimized the comics medium as a site for conveying difficult truths through image and text, and caregivers are now using the form to show-and-tell their life narratives. My doctoral project examines how caregivers use, bend, and break the visual and textual conventions of the graphic novel to represent caregiving for those with disabilities, those who are aging, and those with physical and chronic illnesses. I consider how caregivers reshape depictions of disability, illness, and trauma, and how comics are emerging as a significant, accessible form for conveying the caregiving experience.
Anastazia Csegeny
PhD candidate, Media Studies
Faculty of Information & Media Studies - Western University
Supervisor
Tim Blackmore (https://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/profiles/tim_blackmore.html)
Anastazia (she/her) is a PhD student in Media Studies in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) at Western University, where she is studying the representations of caregiving and caregivers in graphic novel memoirs, supported by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2023-2024). Anastazia’s steadfast passion for comics, graphic novels, and visual literature led her through her Bachelor of Arts in French and English (King’s), Master of Arts in English (Western, SSHRC-funded), and Master of Media in Journalism and Communication (Western). Anastazia is now blending her personal caregiving experience with the formal elements of the comics medium to pursue her doctoral studies as she continues to investigate the many ways text and image work cohesively to enhance storytelling technique and produce complex narratives. Alongside her studies, Anastazia has worked in a variety of academic and professional spaces, including publishing, communications, and the non-profit sector, and she recently began her role as Editorial Assistant for the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC). Anastazia is also dedicated to serving the Western community through collegial activities at both the departmental and university level, and she is currently representing her program as Media Studies Councillor in the Society of Graduate Students (SOGS).
You can connect with Anastazia on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/anastazia-csegeny and via email at acsegeny@uwo.ca.
View Anastazia’s work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/591/.