Podcast Summary

Overview

Episode: Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, "Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics"
Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Date: September 17, 2025

This episode features Dr. Dominic (Dom) Davies and Dr. Candida Rifkind discussing their co-authored book, Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025). The conversation delves into how comics create, challenge, and reshape visual narratives about refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, analyzing both the visual and political craft of these works, and how such comics interact with readers and current sociopolitical contexts.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Collaboration

• Backgrounds and Partnership
  • Dom Davies: Reader in English at City, St. George's, University of London; expertise in postcolonial and infrastructure studies.
  • Candida Rifkind: Professor of English, University of Winnipeg; focus on literary studies, life writing, autobiography, affect theory.
  • Past collaboration: Edited volume, Documenting Trauma in Comics.
  • New method: Each wrote alternating chapters, critiqued one another's drafts, and co-authored the introduction and conclusion — maintaining both distinct voices and a dialogic approach.
    • "It's a combined manuscript, but we have distinct voices, I think, and distinct areas of interest... It's a new methodology that we haven't seen a lot, but I would really recommend." (Candida, 05:39)

2. Defining "Refugee Comics" and Theoretical Framework

• Expansive Notion of "Refugee"

  • Not just the legal definition, but broader lived experiences—“refugeehood” as flexible and shifting (drawing on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s concept of “refugee tude”).
  • Focus mostly on comics made after the 2015 "migrant crisis" — a period when migration was newly foregrounded in European and North American media.
    • “We use 'refugee' in a very expansive sense…what we’re interested in is thinking of refuge as a more expansive set of lived relations and conditions.” (Dom, 08:04)

• Canon and Scope

  • Acknowledges classics (e.g., Maus, Persepolis), but centers newer works engaging with post-2015 debates and visuals, examining both documentary/nonfiction and some speculative/fictional titles.
  • Investigates how comics can both perpetuate harmful narratives (victim/threat) and offer radical refugee agency.

• Reader Positioning: "Citizen Reader"

  • Moves past the vague "Western reader" label, introducing the idea of the "citizen reader/viewer," defined less by geography than by their relationship to citizenship and migration.
    • "For us, the real dynamic here isn't between the West and the non-West, it's between citizens and refugees." (Candida, 13:00)
  • Recognizes the heterogeneity among both refugees and citizens, including those with precarious citizenship.

3. Close Readings and Thematic Chapters

a. Representations of the Sea and Anti-Colonial/Abolitionist Readings

• The Mediterranean as a hyper-visible site; refugee comics often shift focus from individual faces to spaces/oceanscapes, tying current crossings to colonial histories (e.g. the Middle Passage).
  • "The sea isn’t just the sea...it signifies a whole set of stories...helping us to see that the current refugee crisis is the latest symptom in a much longer history of racial capitalism." (Dom, 18:56)

b. Drawing Practices: Humanizing Refugee Camp Life

• Hand-drawn comics foster intimacy and can obscure or detail identity to honor privacy and safety (e.g., Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves).
• Panel frames and visual boundaries allow for cultural references, such as Palestinian embroidery in Leila Abdelrazaq's Badawi.
  • "Comics artists can draw people who need to hide their identity...we can learn the story, but unlike photography or film, we don’t actually see his face." (Candida, 24:03)

c. Comics and the ‘Global War on Terror’

• Comics as “slow journalism”: e.g., Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts uses painstakingly rendered panels to reflect on how news is made, mediated, and ethically fraught.
• Visuality does not equal accountability; comics interrogate the illusion that more visibility prompts action.
  • "What comics can do is...not simply show us, but show how power works visually in the systems that frame our ways of seeing." (Dom, 31:37)

d. Digital Comics vs. Print Comics

• Many refugee comics are available online, but unique digital-first works leverage scrolling, hypertext, sound, and interactivity (e.g., Matt Huynh’s The Boat).
• Pros: Accessibility, interactivity, greater reach for both artists and readers.
• Cons: Digital tools (drones, surveillance) can both empower expression and mirror mechanisms of state control.
  • "It's a mixed blessing. There is a lot of potential for digital comics, but we have to remember...these are the technologies that also frame people as refugees and lead to their surveillance and detainment." (Candida, 37:09)

e. Drone Warfare and Visuality as Violence

• Comics like Hamid Suleiman’s Freedom Hospital and Marwa Al-Sabouni’s Battle for Home use drone-like or sniper perspectives, implicating the reader as a participant in the violence of “seeing.”
• Emphasizes that infrastructures (cities, homes) and not just bodies are targets; comics make visible the broader consequences of war and displacement.
  • "Suddenly seeing is not just a liberatory act...it’s actually the very opposite. To be seen is to be subjected to violence." (Dom, 38:22)

f. Navigating the Ethics of Visualizing Violence

• Comics can alienate or defamiliarize violence through framing, gutters, and selective representation—inviting critical engagement rather than voyeurism.
• They may emphasize consequences over direct depiction (e.g., post-violence trauma and ecological change).
  • "We see the framing of war visually on the page, but also in the sense Judith Butler talks about: framing as putting inside a visual frame, but also as 'setting up' or making culpable." (Candida, 45:18)
• Comics can disrupt the text/image hierarchy, allowing refugees to narrate their experiences directly.
  • "Comics flip and rewire that hierarchical relationship...allowing refugees access to the text in a way that our visual culture otherwise denies." (Dom, 49:22)

g. Second Generation Refugee Comics

• Focus on life writing by children of refugees (e.g., Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do); explores inherited trauma, memory, oral history, and the intersection of personal/family and geopolitical histories.
• Research is differntiated by attention to interviews, family archives, and the act of narrating collective familial experience.
  • "We often see the artist drawing themselves talking to their parents—parents who are variously reticent or not to talk about their past..." (Candida, 51:36)

4. Closing Reflections and Future Research Directions

• Both guests note the continued proliferation of refugee comics, particularly in response to events like the 2023-2024 Gaza conflict, often circulated rapidly via social media (e.g., Mayson Kabbaj’s Gaza in My Phone).
• Ongoing research on digital comics, comics about immigration enforcement (e.g., Becky Burt’s work on ICE detention), and explorations into culinary comics as another diasporic form.
  • "Sitting with this material for so long is hard...so I’m interested in the growing interest in culinary comics...using comics to 'thicken' our understanding of foodways." (Candida, 57:36)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the collaborative process:
  "The best part of the process for me...was I had an interlocutor...Deeply immersed in the field. That could bring some fresh eyes and perhaps new references, new thoughts." (Candida, 05:16)

• On redefining the reader:
  "The real dynamic here isn't between the west and the non west, it's between citizens and refugees." (Candida, 13:03)

• On the unique power of comics:
  “Comics are particularly strong. They help us to see how we're seeing...we see the world twice.” (Dom, 32:17)

• On panel borders and visual framing:
  "Comics are a framing form...they contain [war], and they make us aware of the structures that frame them and produce them." (Candida, 45:16)

• On digital comics as double-edged sword:
  "We tend to get really excited about new technologies, but...we have to remember that a lot of the technologies that make these comics possible...are also those that frame people as refugees and lead to their surveillance and detainment." (Candida, 37:22)

• On hope for the future:
  "If anything, these types of comics are proliferating under the current climate...comics by cooks and chefs...are bringing globalized foodstuffs back to particular cultures through comics and recipes." (Candida, 57:18)

Key Timestamps

• 01:34: Episode and guests introduced
• 04:31: Collaborative writing process and methodology
• 08:02: Defining “refugee comics” and audience conceptualization
• 15:49: Representations of the sea and broader historical framing
• 23:20: Specific comics techniques for humanizing refugee camps
• 27:59: How comics critique the War on Terror’s visual legacy
• 33:37: Print vs digital comics, interactivity, and surveillance
• 38:10: Drone warfare, seeing as violence, and cityscapes
• 44:59: Ethical tensions over depicting violence
• 51:18: Second generation refugee comics and narrative family research
• 54:33: Future research directions

Conclusion

Davies and Rifkind’s Graphic Refuge offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of how refugee comics visualize displacement, frame agency and victimhood, and engage readers as “citizen viewers.” The episode outlines how comics can both challenge dominant narratives and navigate the ethics of representing trauma—demonstrating the form’s unique capacity for visual and textual interplay. The discussion also highlights the ongoing evolution of the field, with digital, social media, and even culinary comics creating new spaces for diasporic and immigrant stories.