Illustration
Illustrated Research
These are illustrations I have produced for my book, Ageing with Smartphones in Japan. Illustrations can captivate. They can show rather than tell. They can resonate powerfully, bringing imagination and emotion to the fore. I am excited by the possibilities that illustration opens up for anthropological research and publishing.
My current project, Feeling at Home in a Digital World, will result in an even more visually-focused book that combines participant images with my own graphic narratives, examining how older people create spaces of wellbeing at home, in their neighbourhoods, and online.
A series of short comics I produced about my research participants' experiences of the pandemic in Japan.
An article I co-wrote featuring several comics on the findings of the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA) project, illustrated by John Cei Douglas and scripted by myself and Georgiana Murariu.
I led a collaboration with artist John Cei Douglas to produce a zine about the key findings of the ASSA project. Designed for use in teaching digital anthropology, the zine features ten comics with stories from across the project's field sites. Please feel free to download and share!
Book Covers
I designed and illustrated the cover for 'The Good Enough Life' by Daniel Miller. Published by Polity 2023
I illustrated the cover for 'What are Exhibitions for? An Anthropological Approach' by Inge Daniels. Published by Bloomsbury 2019. The book also contains several of my illustrations, based on research I conducted mapping visitor behaviour within an exhibition space.
I illustrated the cover for 'Introduction to educational anthropology: A textbook' (Einfuehrung in die Bildungsanthropologie: Ein Lehrbuch) edited by Christa Markom and Jelena Tošić. Published by New Academic Press 2022. (In German).
Exhibitions
In 2020 I co-curated the exhibition Illustrating Anthropology with Dr Jennifer Cearns and with the support of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, where we were Leach/RAI Fellows in Public Anthropology. The exhibition has received over 20,000 visitors and has generated a lively Instagram community.
The exhibition explores human lives around the world through comics, drawings, and paintings of anthropological research. From those who use illustration as a fieldwork method, to others who partner with artists and research participants to tell stories, this exhibition draws together a wide range of ways that contemporary anthropologists are illustrating anthropology.
A selection of work was shown at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool as part of Being Human – the UK’s national festival of the humanities.
In 2022 I curated a 'special theme' of the multimodal journal Trajectoria, published by the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan. The issue, titled "Ethno-graphic Collaborations: Crossing Borders with Multimodal Illustration," presents four different modes of anthropological collaboration through illustration. This online exhibition features two artist-researcher collaborations, and two other pieces that expand the meaning and remit of collaboration through graphic ethnography across space and time. In the video discussions that follow the artistic pieces I explore with the contributors what effects interdisciplinary collaboration through illustration might have on the way anthropology is conceptualised as a discipline, and on its wider impact in the world.
