Introduction

The move towards creative research outputs within academia has seen a recent and rapid uptake of mediums such as comics, zines, film, podcasts, and theatre to translate and engage the wider public in academia (Arevalo et al, 2020). These mediums can both be powerful and enlightening ways to communicate research findings, though they also come with distinct challenges (Hall et al, 2021). In this chapter we discuss the process and potential of communicating crisis research in creative forms, using the example of comics. More specifically, we draw upon our own experiences of developing creative research outputs and explore this process by looking at the comic, After Maria: Everyday Recovery from Disaster. This comic translates Gemma Sou's ethnographic research on how low-income Puerto Rican families recovered from the impacts of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the Caribbean island in September 2017. Our aim is to use the After Maria example as a means of developing critical discussions about the representational politics, pedagogy, and process of translating crisis research into comic form.

We argue that communicating crisis research via comics is a highly democratic process because it ensures your research is accessible to your participants as well as the wider public. Relatedly, the production of comics also enables a more participatory research process whereby participants can shape how their story is told. Comics are also uniquely positioned to produce a politics of representation that challenges reductive, dehumanising, and apolitical narratives about crisis-affected people that often circulate in mainstream media (Scott, 2014), and in academic research (Tuck, 2009). Furthermore, comics offer powerful rhetorical power as they are uniquely able to distil complex ideas into engaging and highly learnable forms (Chute, 2016).

We begin by outlining the communicative capacity of comics, before giving further details on the development of After Maria. We then detail practical issues, learning spaces, and representational challenges, before offering some conclusions.

Comics

A comic is generally an illustration that employs metaphor and/or storytelling to clearly communicate an idea to a broad audience (McCloud, 1994). Comics that centre on and tackle political, social, and economic issues are known as ‘serious’ comics.

Individuals with TBI are vulnerable to a range of cognitive impairments that can interact with psychological comorbidities to lead to chronic challenges with social and occupational functioning in the community. Epilepsy is similarly associated with cognitive difficulties that can be further undermined by the medical, psychological, and psychosocial sequelae of the illness. Although there are limited empirical studies specifically examining cognition in PTE to date, emerging evidence suggests that the development of seizures after TBI may result in a “double hit” to cognitive functioning. This chapter outlines the cognitive sequelae of TBI and epilepsy, and presents a model of cognitive impairment in PTE. It reviews the scant literature on the cognitive consequences of PTE, highlighting current gaps in the literature. Finally, it describes an approach to cognitive rehabilitation in PTE, based on the well-established principles in TBI adapted to accommodate the unique challenges of PTE.

Introduction

Children, young people and families in hard times

This book set out to illuminate the personal, everyday effects of hard times for children, young people and families in diverse global contexts. In this concluding chapter, we begin by outlining the contribution of the three Parts of the book and their constituent chapters to our understanding of the hard times which interlace with the lives of children, youth and families. Our focus on ‘hard times’ aims to shed light on all manner of structural inequalities, longstanding exclusions and power imbalances which are being constituted or intensified by neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. Elucidating the implications of these complexly relational, hurtful and deeply affecting moments leads us to reflect on the opportunities and prospects for socially-differentiated children and young people getting by and growing up in hard times. In bringing together neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises, we recognise how these processes are lumped together, materially and spatially (Katz, 2004; 2018) and in people's everyday experiences. Drawing the collection to a close, we consider further directions for research which is sensitive to the interrelations between broadscale political-economic shifts and locally-scaled, personally inflected inequalities.

Examining hard times: a collection

Divided into three key Parts, the collection began with an exploration of the transformative impacts of hard times for children, youth and families at the sharp end of neoliberalisms, austerities and economic crises. Drawing on work from diverse international contexts, Part 1 explored the transformations which play out unevenly at personal, familial and local scales as a result of political-economic processes. The chapters detail how hard times impinge on the discursive norms and deeply-rooted social inequalities which pervade the lives of children, youth and families. In Part 2 of the book, our contributors sketch out the ways in which the contours of hard times intersect with axes of social difference to produce new or intensified forms of poverty and inequality. The chapters outline how alongside experiences of precarity and marginalisation, social ties and moral responsibilities are being refashioned, moderated or entrenched in the lives of children, youth and families. Heteropatriarchal familial norms, intergenerational obligations, discourses of normative childhoods and politics of poverty coalesce with marginality and inequalities, constituting variegated experiences of hard times.

Introduction

We wish this book was not necessary

This collection gives voice to children, young people and families at the sharp end of contemporary processes of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises in diverse global contexts. We wish this book was not necessary or timely. However, as three geographers who have worked with many children, young people and families in different settings over the last 15 years, we are writing from a deep sense of sadness and urgency. This book has developed out of our anger and concern that the lives and prospects of so many of our research participants have demonstrably been adversely affected by manifestations of neoliberalisations, austerities and economic crises. The book is also written from heartbreak that our own communities, families and lifecourses have been profoundly affected by the same horrible processes. So as a point of departure, the following three vignettes from our research introduce some key terms, processes and deeply affecting encounters which echo throughout the following chapters.

John's research: just getting on with austerities, or ‘we’re fucked’?

During the global financial crisis of 2007–08, John was in the middle of several research projects based in spaces of play, youthwork and social care in the English Midlands. These spaces and communities were radically transformed by subsequent public sector funding cuts. Literally all of the youth organisations John worked with back then have now closed; literally all of the youthworkers and practitioners he worked with were made redundant. Within a few years entire, taken-for-granted categories of work/space (‘the public library’, ‘the statutory youth service’) were downsized, decommissioned and – apparently permanently – deemed unviable. John has written about some of these experiences (Horton, 2016; 2020) but, to be honest, finds it a bit too difficult. John holds on to the way many young people from these contexts demonstrated such tenacity, care and solidarity: ‘a kind of modest, resigned, sometimes-determined acceptance’ and capacity to ‘just get on’ with their lives and communities (Horton, 2017: 287). On the other hand, John can still hear a research participant talking about the probable closure of a particular service: they simply said ‘we’re fucked’ and walked away.