Narrating Digital Access, Trauma, and Disability Through Comics and Image Description in Denmark

ABSTRACT

Anthropologists explore sequential art, particularly comics, as an accessible medium to co-produce knowledge about trauma and disability with research collaborators. However, practices of image description developed by blind scholars and artists need to be integrated into these projects to ensure visual studies are accessible. Collaborating with sighted service users of drop-in centers in Denmark, we reflect on the process of creating comics and image descriptions about their experiences with digital access, trauma, and disability. By analyzing insights from both drawing and describing images, we propose this method in medical anthropology as one way to build research collaborations that embrace disability expertise.

KEYWORDS:

• Denmark
• digital access
• disability
• drop-in center
• graphic anthropology
• image description

Acknowledgments

We are thankful for the contributions of Ann, Inge, Sofie, Annemarie, Allan, Tina-Lykke, Marika Sabroe and the voice actors: Rose Marie Højbjerg Henrichsen, Katja de Neergaard, Sunniva Sandbukt, Frauke Mennes, Rune Koldborg, and Laura Juncker. We also thank Baki Cakici, Katta Spiel, Jeannette Pols, Kainen Bell, Paul-Georg Ender, Fatema Abdoolcarim, Jaime Revenga, Marisa Cohn, Lara Reime, The HCI group at TU Wien, and our editors and reviewers for their feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

The study has been approved by the IT University of Copenhagen’s Research Ethics Committee. Reference: 2023–1767/2621534 (F2).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2023.2267164

Notes

1. Disability scholar Margaret Price coined the term bodymind to argue for the interdependence of body and mind in understanding experiences of disability, access, pain, and desire (Price 2015).

2. Anthropologist Erin Durban in an article published in the journal American Anthropologist (2022) refers to ableism by citing attorney and disability activist Talila Lewis’ ongoing definition: “a system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This systemic oppression that leads to people and society determining people’s value based on their culture, age, language, appearance, religion, birth or living place, ‘health/wellness’, and/or their ability to satisfactorily re/produce, ‘excel’ and ‘behave’. You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.” Working definition by @TalilaLewis, updated January 2022, developed in community with disabled Black/negatively racialized folk, especially @NotThreeFifths (Talila A. Lewis 2022).

3. Visual anthropologist Kai M. Green reflects on an ethnographic moment where one of their collaborators found the use of the term “subject” threatening (Green 2015:190).

4. We use neurodivergent as a term to describe individuals who differ from neurologically typical people. Disabled scholars have used the term to center autism. Neurodivergence can also refer to people with learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, Tourette’s syndrome, dementia, bipolar disorder, and other identities that differ from neurotypical ways of being (Rauchberg 2022:371).

5. The Danish Parliament passed a law intended to simplify the rules for exemption from mandatory digital self-service. This amendment, brought forward by Marie Bjerre, Minister of Digitalization and Equality, took effect on June 1, 2023, with unanimous support. The amendment facilitates that citizens who can opt out of mandatory digital post automatically have the right to an alternative to digital self-service (the law does not apply to court case portals and the private sector). Before this law, civil society organizations criticized mandatory digital self-service laws as citizens who could opt out of the mandate had to justify a new exemption every time any given public administration task requested the use of a digital self-service.

6. The sites included: 1) a public library that supports racialized communities with communication with public authorities, 2) digital inclusion events organized by the Agency for Digital Government, inviting civil society organizations and representatives of public authorities to participate in networking activities, 3) a digital drop-in center on Facebook maintained by the National Association of Drop-in Centers, and 4) a municipal counseling space for neurodivergent families.

7. This information is accessible in an internal report created by the organization Pluss in 2022, which is titled: Evalueringsrapport: Det Digitale Værested.

8. The process of combining drawing and image description was inspired by a chapter on drawing as analysis, written by anthropologist Douglas-Jones (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This study received funding from Nordforsk as part of the project Infrastructures for Partially Digital Citizens: Supporting Informal Welfare Work in the Digitized State [nr. 100742].

Notes on contributors

Barbara Nino Carreras

Barbara Nino Carreras is a PhD Candidate in the Technologies in Practice research group and the ETHOS Lab at the IT University of Copenhagen. She draws upon theories from the field of critical disability studies, anthropology, and human-computer interaction.

Brit Ross Winthereik

Brit Ross Winthereik is a professor in the Division for Responsible Innovation and Design at the Department of Technology at the Technical University of Denmark. She works with theories from the field of science and technology studies and anthropology.