Introduction: Comics Ethnographies.

In autumn 2022, we organised an online round table dedicated to the theme of 'graphic narratives of social justice' which was supported by a small British Academy grant and hosted by the Centre for the Study of Inequality, Culture and Difference at Nottingham Trent University. While we had both been working on and with comics and graphic novels in different capacities for a number of years, this was the start of an ongoing conversation of which this special issue comprises the next step. The articles presented here work together to set out a series of key themes, challenges, and to some extent, ethical imperatives around the rapidly growing use of comics and graphic novels by researchers, educators, and activists to increase wider understanding, engagement and empathy with marginalised groups and individuals as well as forgotten or overlooked events and histories. Not all the 'ethnographies' explored in this issue are produced by academics or with the intention of being read as ethnographies. As such, a further aim is to suggest how comics as research blur boundaries between traditional scholarly disciplines and the hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination these continue to engender. To help situate the articles, our editorial introduction will consider the wider 'graphic turn' within ethnographic research over the past decade, emphasising the connections with other established graphic genres, including autobiographical and documentary comics, together with the important role played by comics within the growing fields of memory and trauma studies. We will then set out what we consider to be the common threads taken up by different authors across the issue – community building, author/artists positionality and reflexivity, translatability, and accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]