From collective memory to activism: Exploring the mechanisms of comics as multimodal tools for transformative learning

Abstract There is today a growing variety of types of memory mediations that often go further than memorialisation and heritage-building. Comics are undoubtedly part of this movement as their verbal-visual storytelling form tends to prompt layered responses from reader-viewers. Reader-viewers find themselves surprised, moved, and transformed by that reading experience. In this article, we take as a case study a comic page laying out the impact of agriculture’s industrial organisation in France shared by Les Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings) and its sister organisation, the Bassines Non Merci collective. It is a good example to address our central questions of how multimodal languages such as this one-page comic facilitate the process of transformative learning and how such multimodal forms allow one to move from memory-making, crystallising a specific event, to an amplification of engagement that leads to collective action. In short, it allows us to study the specific mechanisms and affordances that multimodal modes of communication, such as comics, possess as tools for transformative learning. In the first section of the article, we investigate the different types of relational engagement that can lead to transformative learning in comics. The second section focusses more specifically on emotions and their role in transformative learning. Finally, we look at the specific comics mechanisms that support transformative learning. Specifically, we look at how comics create a disjunction, give meaning to that disjunction, and help reader-viewers practise real or imaginary resolution that impact identity formation.