Beauty: Triggering the Sociological Imagination with a Webcomic

Giselinde Kuipers; Fiammetta  Ghedini

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/12774

Authors

Giselinde Kuipers Center for Sociological Research, KU Leuven https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5767-1054

Giselinde Kuipers is a Research Professor of Sociology at the KU Leuven in Belgium and co-chair of the European Center for the Study of Culture and Inequality (ECCI). Kuipers has published widely on beauty, humor, media, memes, cycling, cultural production and transnational culture and is the author of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke and many articles, mostly in English and Dutch. In 2010, she received an ERC starting grant to study beauty standards in the European fashion field.
Fiammetta Ghedini RIVA Illustration https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8987-8503

Co-founder of RIVA Illustrations, an agency providing researchers and institutions with tailor-made visual storytelling, Fiammetta Ghedini works on the frontier between science and communication with a focus on drawing and illustration. After her PhD she has worked with universities and educational institutions around the world to illustrate science via drawing and video. She has been editorial coordinator for ERCcOMICS, a series of comics issued via collaboration between artists and scientists, sponsored by the European Research Council.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/12774

Keywords:

Beauty, Sociology, Comics, Science Communication, Visuality

Abstract

The standard academic publication is often not an effective way to trigger the sociological imagination. This essay discusses an alternative means to invite people to think sociologically: a webcomic. In a collaboration between a sociologist and a team of comic artists, we created a webcomic (www.erccomics.com) to highlight insights from a research project on the social shaping of beauty standards in the transnational modelling industry. In the making of this Beauty comic, three "translations" had to be done: from analytical to narrative, from verbal to visual and from conceptual to concrete. We discuss how these translations were done and what we learned from this, including broader implications of these translations for (social) science communication, the public relevance of sociological research, the usefulness of thinking in different modalities and the fraught relationship between standard academic modes of communication and the sociological imagination.

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Beauty: Triggering the Sociological Imagination with a Webcomic

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