In the spring of 2025 when I took Adam Rosenblatt’s class Graphic Ethnography: Comics as Research, I was both curious and nervous. I was certain that drawing and comics were skills I sorely lacked, but I was also curious and wanted to explore different ways of doing ethnography, especially since I was headed out for dissertation fieldwork in the coming summer. For our final project for the class, each student was paired with a resident at TROSA, a Durham-based residential recovery home for people living with addictions. In this short, ethnographic-based comic, our goal was to collaboratively create a seven-page comic based on the lives of our TROSA partners. This is how I came to know C. Collins (a pseudonym).

Before I met C. Collins at her apartment in TROSA, I was nervous. It was not the fact that I would be listening to a person recovering from addiction tell me their story that made me nervous. I had worked in mental health organizations in India for a long time before beginning my PhD, and my PhD itself involved working with people who experience gambling addiction. I was uncertain because I didn’t know if I would be able to do justice to her story via comics. It was not an anxiety that C. Collins shared, however, since she had already envisioned the direction of the project and what she wanted represented in the comics. I understood quickly that there was less of an interest to tell her story as it had happened and how she had experienced addiction. Instead, C. Collins saw comics as a medium to imagine and speculate what a better future for her—a life worth staying clean for—would look like.

In the comic below, C. Collins and I worked together to describe what the biggest shift had been for her since moving to TROSA two years ago. As she reflected, she began to describe how this was the first time in her life where she enjoys her own company, sometimes preferring it over time spent with other people. Her first few days at TROSA had been difficult, and everyday life was shaped by her recovery needs. She drew panels that attest to how fragmented time and life was for her those first few weeks. Popsicles. Television sets with TROSA educational materials blaring. And long days of isolation. It was the first time in her life where she was confronted with so much solitude. Even though her partner had arrived in TROSA a few weeks before her, every new resident had to undergo a period of detox that had to be done alone. It was a few months later that C. Collins was shifted to one of the apartments within the campus that she shared with roommates. Even there, C. Collins spent a considerable amount of time alone, as an unfamiliar yet rewarding experience. She described the times in her busy day when she was able to sit by —after work in the evening. Then again before bed. These moments weren’t just tolerable but had become the most enjoyable and longed-for moments—an experience that would have made the C. Collins before TROSA very uncomfortable. Fond of creating new terms, she termed it “alonement” and defines it in the comic panel below.

The next few meetings with C. Collins were spent on understanding who she had become and what she now wanted in the future. For Collins, who she has become is very important to the future that she now wants, and which is made possible by the changes and transformations she has encountered the last two years. Trying out different futures, some of these scenes included her finishing school, marrying her partner, and, eventually, driving into the future in the car she will share with her partner and dog. The drawings occurred alongside a running commentary as C. Collins negotiated with chronology, which futures to try on and the limits of speculation. Decisions were made on what futures to prioritize, which scenes should be made visible given the seven-page limit, and which futures to shelve for the time being. Ultimately, creative decisions were fueled by what speculations seemed possible for C. Collins at that moment and whom she wanted to share these futures with. In this process, Collins took stock of herself, what she wanted from her future, and why she wanted the things she did. Working collaboratively, I was opportune to witness how comics enabled a speculative process wherein she was able to try out different futures and examine her relationship with each speculation.

In Sally Pirie’s “Not a Mirror, But an Icon: Ethnographic Comic Art in Three Acts” (2019), Pirie (formerly Galman) intentionally redraws the commitments ethnographers have. As an artist and ethnographer, she argues that the process of fieldwork yields knowledge through new meanings, as well as healing. Rather than the “product” or the final analysis of each ethnographic project, Pirie argues for attention to be diverted to the process of fieldwork, or the process of knowledge production, instead. For Pirie, the process of seeking itself produced knowledge. “Process work as using the arts (in my case, comics) to grapple with uncomfortable data and fieldwork experience while resisting the urge to reduce complexity or normalize experience; it expands upon the traditional research memo by employing the inherently iterative process of moving a piece of comic art from the initial pencil sketches through to the final inked panels and beyond.” This was particularly true for the kind of ethnographic work and time in history when Pirie was conducting fieldwork. Working with young transgender and gender-creative children who experienced violence during the 2016 U.S. election, Pirie uses a three-act scene to tell the story of how an eight-year-old transgender child experienced violence, made sense of it, and reclaimed his agency. She writes of her process, “I asked him to tell me the story, then tell me how the story was ‘in his head,’ and then tell the story how he would tell it if he were the author writing a book, in control of the plot and the possibilities.”

For Pirie, the value of process work lay in the absolute requirement to stay in the moment, allowing experiences to move between categorical worlds of true, true in one’s own head, and a speculation of the “more-than-true.” Comics and ethnography together enable a speculative (re-)processing of traumatic memories via comics’ capacity to make room for the more-than-true worlds to exist in and ethnography’s requirement to stay in the moments. In “The Brick,” we see glimpses of how ethnographic comics can generate a reclamation of meaning. Comics allow new worlds to be imagined—providing deep insights into what moves our interlocutors, what attachments they have, and what hopes they harbor—just as they open spaces to say and imagine things that would be too hard to say and imagine otherwise. For C. Collins, too, comics allowed her to try on new futures, and while she described her life as it currently is, she employed the process work of comics to “take into account individual meaning-making and fears, as well as the stories of what might have happened, what we wish could have happened, and what may happen in the future” (Pirie 2019). The process of comic-making for C. Collins led to an internal reckoning on her attachments, who she wants to read and bear witness to her life, and the people she imagines her future with.

Now a year later and deeper into my own fieldwork, I think about the ethnographic process I co-experienced with C. Collins and what it taught me. As I tackle questions about addiction that are simultaneously theoretical and methodological in my field site, I often return to the questions that emerged during the time with C. Collins. What do the worlds that speculative comics build tell us about the one we live in now? What can the process of collaboratively creating comics tell us about what changes we need to access the speculative worlds? For C. Collins, it is a world that considers the past and the present but heavily emphasizes the future one wishes and hopes for. For her, meaning and revelation arrive through what she hopes for in the future. The speculative possibilities of comics emerged as Collins waded through questions of what could have been and what can still be.