“How Did We Meet?”: Experiments with Ethnographic Comics in Nepal

Abstract This comic-format article details a 2024 workshop that the authors held in Nepal, in which Nepali, US, and Chinese writers and artists teamed up to create collaborative, nonfiction, research-based comics. Participants’ research focused on “everyday life” in the Nepali city of Patan and was grounded in open-ended ethnographic interviews that each pair conducted with locals. This article draws on the events and output of the workshop to consider the role of comics in ethnographic studies. We focus on how one pair's comic helped the partners reflect critically on how they might go about forming the relationships that ground ethnographic research, while also pointing to the topic of relationship formation as a potential area of ethnographic inquiry. We conclude by discussing how the comic-making endeavor highlighted the importance of reflexivity in ethnographic work.