“Swirling a Million Feelings into One”: Working-Through Critical and Affective Responses to the Holocaust through Comics

Abstract

Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies, affect theory, and critical literacy, this article explores comics made by three eighth-grade students in response to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus. Students’ comics were developed through participatory research alongside their classroom teacher, a research team, and teacher candidates from a local university. These three students, Stella, Maisie, and Naomi, reacted strongly to the content of Maus and the comics medium, and raised questions around identity, representation, and the legibility of their often-intense emotional responses. We trace their affective engagements to explore how comic-making allowed students to represent feelings that are often difficult to make visible in school spaces. Our analysis highlights how affective critical literacy orients teaching and research toward working-through rather than resolving complicated emotions, allowing educators to recognize unanswered questions as forms of critical engagement.

“Gender is like an ocean”: Exploring the intersections of queer literacy research and teaching through filmmaking

“…Filmmaking-as-research and filmmakingas-pedagogy created space for student editors to do deep reflexive work on their experiences of exploring gender and to situate that experience within a wider socio-political context in order to craft a documentary narrative for a general audience. Further, our rereading of the film-as-process allowed us to recognize both the production and presentation as the asking of questions and surfacing of emotional responses, both central to critical literacy classrooms (Lewis & Tierney, 2013;Simon et al, 2022).…”