While some readers may interpret the story told in Moody Bluth as a story of the failure of institutional disability assistance centres to adequately carry out their mandate to support students with disabilities, this was not our intention. Not being very artistic herself, Margo was very excited to work with notabeanie first to explore some of the issues that students with disabilities experience within the context of the increasingly corporatized university, and then to explore ways to share this information both inside and outside of academic contexts. The potential of non-traditional formats, such as graphic novels, comic books, zines, art, and music, to acknowledge and democratize diverse sources and forms of knowledge production, is a continuing interest. Part of this, has been a long standing concern with finding ways to share the production and dissemination of knowledge with those we do research with (including students, research subjects, and community members). In her research in Brazil and Canada, she has maintained a strong concern with the practices and potential of women-identified groups, anti-poverty coalitions, community associations, and other such community- and identity-based organizations to effect emancipatory practices and everyday resistances. Margo’s long standing interests revolve around issues of power and inequality, in particular in relation to the development of capitalism and neoliberalism, agroindustry, class, gender, poverty, homelessness, and the politics of food and hunger. Margo Matwychuk teaches in Anthropology and Social Justice Studies and is Director of the Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Program in Social Justice Studies at the University of Victoria. The characters are purely fictional and are not meant to depict any real-life individuals, but I hope that the obstacles that they face and their emotional experiences accurately and metaphorically embody some of the real-life experiences of people with invisible and contested disabilities. While the comic is fiction, it’s threaded through with academic research and real-life, auto-ethnographic experience. In trying to understand how those experiences were shaped by social systems like ableism, neoliberalism, and institutionalism, I got excited about using fiction and art as nuanced and accessible ways to discuss these hard-to-talk-about ideas.
Inkdrop cafe comics series#
Moody Bluth: Anti-Neoliberal Sleuth began as a tiny spark of an idea that came out of a series of research essays I wrote examining my own experiences as a student accessing disability services. You can find all this and more at twitter. Notabeanie also makes poetry, comedy, and art.
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