CSS 2025 | "Resistant, Resilient, and Resolute: Social Justice and Comics"
Thursday, 10 July 2025 - Saturday, 12 July 2025, Michigan State University
Since the turn of the century, comics have considered the contested nature of American identity. Comic strips, comic books, and editorial cartoons featured stereotypes and caricatures that contributed to non-white people’s marginalization in the United States and advanced narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. The weight of this visual history often obscures the moments when artists, writers, and publishers fought against the regressive imaginary and offered something new. From the dynamic imagination of African American cartoonists such as Jay Jackson’s Bungleton Green in the 1940s to contemporary comic innovators such as C. Spike Trotman’s Iron Circus Comics, the urge to create diverse comics has a long legacy.
Given this history, we celebrate the resistance, resilience, and resolution demonstrated in the comic medium. As we approach the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, it’s a time to reflect on the progress made and the work that still lies ahead. We recognize that the revolution will be drawn and celebrate the artists, scholars, and communities that embrace the comic medium to do so. We celebrate an expanding literature in comic studies that highlights how those groups, often framed at the margin, have moved to the center of the cultural conversation. This is achieved not only through the celebration of characters that reflect them but also by seizing the imagined affordance of the comic form to elevate, transform, and inspire new conversation. Building on the dynamic comic scholarship that recognizes how readers leveraged the imagined affordance of the comic page to create new worlds and challenge old paradigms.
We invite comics scholars from around the world to submit proposals for the 8th annual Comics Studies Society that engage in topics pertaining to the transformative potential of comics.
Some possible topics:
- Graphic representations of social justice movements
- Biography, liberation, and comics
- Contemporary African-American cartoonists
- Contemporary webcomics and identity
- Fandoms and identity
- Transmedia storytelling
- Satire and political cartooning
- Afrofuturism in legacy and new media texts
- Recovering lost voices
- (Re-)narrating the past
- Comics production and community
- The social and political work of comics
- Comics and/as community
- Transnational comics production
- Comics journalism and protest
- Comics engaged with ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, DRC, and Nicaragua
- Comics engaging with the history and legacy of ethnic violence
- Hidden legacies of transnational creators
- Site-specific readings of comic texts
Submission Guidelines
- Abstracts: Submit a 250-word abstract outlining your paper’s main argument, methodology, and contribution.
- Format: We welcome individual paper proposals, pre-formed panels, media objects (such as comics, video, Twine, or performance), and workshops that engage with how comics disrupt normative expectations. The CSS is dedicated to supporting multimodal presentation formats.
- EXTENDED Deadline: February 21, 2025
- Submission Forms:
Important Dates:
- Abstract Submission Deadline: February 21, 2025
- Notification of Acceptance: March 14, 2025
Contact Information:
For questions, please contact the Conference Committee at comicsstudiesorg@gmail.com.
