In the spring of 2025, the three authors in this series met through a course called Graphic Ethnography: Comics as Research. Adam, Federico, and Joanna—a professor and two cultural anthropology PhD students—began a semester-long engagement focusing on comics as an ethnographic method, form of knowledge production, and complex site where new understandings of the world emerge. One of the first course requirements was for students to acquire a sketchbook (with the suggestion that they go to a local art or office supply store and hold a few different ones in their hands, feeling out the right size and shape). The course was not limited to reading texts and discussing them. It was also drawing, creating comics—actively implementing what we were learning in real time.

As the semester progressed, several discussions emerged about what comics do for ethnographic research and how we could incorporate comics as both research archive and method, individually and collectively. Adam, a lifelong comics reader, had recently completed a year’s training at the Sequential Artists Workshop and was actively beginning to incorporate drawing and comics into his research. Meanwhile, Federico and Joanna were still designing their PhD projects as well as the methods they would employ in fieldwork and beyond. Readings moved from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993) to Andrew Causey’s Drawn to See (2016) as we studied examples of comics-based research put into practice, including an article by pioneering graphic ethnographer Sally Pirie (2025), and Claudio Sopranzetti, Sara Fabbri, and Chiara Natalucci’s book-length graphic ethnography King of Bangkok (2021). As we studied academic works of graphic ethnography, along with other texts where the research was carried out in comics form, several questions emerged. We discussed, along with other students, how comics enabled us to see our field sites differently, the new worlds that comics built from old field sites, and how comics functioned as pedagogy in and of itself. We came together to collaborate on how comics could be employed both in and beyond the classroom—as a speculative method and theoretical framework, as access to interlocutors and topics otherwise deemed “impossible,” and as a method for field notes, which would serve the purpose of staying with moments from the field to understand and see them better (Causey 2016; Markert & Trombley 2018).

Conversations around comics continued even after the course ended, and the three of us, across different continents, got together regularly on Zoom to discuss the ways in which we were using comics in our own worlds and work. Comics unearth and build worlds and new meanings, as does ethnography. Our projects, each in their own way, are exercises in constructing and reconstructing social realities. Looking at our field notes, sketches, and ultimately in published work, a common thread emerged. We were each using comics to probe complexities in our own work and simultaneously arriving at some form of world-building. But the term “world-building” can refer to many things—from a Tolkien-esque exercise in building fantastical lands in near-obsessive detail, to the far more compressed, claustrophobic ways of “navigating space” we experienced in class (Jooha 2021), as we read Tings Chak’s graphic narrative Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (2014). 

What we kept circling back to, what seemed to live inside the daily practice of our research for all three of us, was a more specific element of building worlds: speculation. The shift in terms was key. Speculation is not just a theme that cuts across our research; it is a practice that connects how we move through uncertainty in the field, commit to partial claims, follow hunches, and translate stories into images. It is also a concept that has gained serious traction in contemporary anthropological debate (Anderson, Backe, Nelms, Reddy, & Trombley 2018), suggesting that our work is part of a broader disciplinary trend.

Adam had designed the final project of the course as a collaborative comic with a residential substance abuse recovery program in Durham, called TROSA. The project paired students with TROSA residents for one-on-one encounters where they drew together and, eventually, made a comic based on the resident’s storytelling about their life (a skill the residents already practice, regularly, as part of their program). As we learned the details of our partners’ stories, we took on the challenge of collaborating with them, through comics, on ways to tell their stories. This shared comics-making process often crossed over, in surprising ways, into speculative modes.

For instance, Federico was partnered with Carol Anne (who preferred only her first and middle names be used in the project). In one of their first meetings, they talked about representation. Inspired by a Bible verse, Carol Anne decided she wanted to be represented by an eagle that was recovering and growing her wings again. This meant speculating about her past, present, and future, while incorporating fiction as a means of telling her story. The final comic combined her drawings, handwriting, and Federico’s ideas in an ethnographic comic jointly created by both researcher and interlocutor.

In what follows, we introduce our three projects and trace how speculation runs through each of them. We then explore the meanings of speculation in contemporary anthropology, and why comics, as a formally speculative medium, turned out to be such a rich space for new approaches to our teaching and research.

Adam’s recent research (Rosenblatt 2024) has described the ongoing reclamation efforts in systemically neglected African American burial grounds. For him, speculation—whether articulated as a full methodology, as in Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) “critical fabulation,” or in lower-stakes, more private explorations in sketchbooks and field notes (such as the ones Adam describes in his post for this series)—is key to acknowledging the presence of the dead in these spaces, and their stakes in what happens as people gather in a cemetery to transform it.

Federico’s PhD project examines the boom of the sports gambling industry in Colombia as a window into the entanglements between desire, technology, and risk under contemporary capitalism. He works with professional sports gamblers, following the ways they navigate uncertainty and the future in their daily lives. Federico’s interlocutors do not just speculate about match outcomes. They also speculate about what their lives could look like within capitalism. 

Joanna’s PhD explores how a gambling addiction in Northeast India raises questions about the parameters of addiction, what is considered traditional, and how precarity, faith, and survival are experienced and negotiated. She examines how the gambling addiction’s illegibility in clinical spaces leads those closest to it to speculate on the causes, damage, and possibilities of addiction—weaving together stakes and attachments from the past, present, and future. 

Speculation as Ethnographic Method

Speculation, as we use it here, is a temporal and affective orientation. Bryant and Knight (2019) describe it as a “futural” stance that emerges in gaps of indeterminacy, moments when the future cannot be clearly anticipated and the present becomes uncanny, prompting individuals and communities to engage in practices of rumor, gossip, and projection as ways of navigating uncertainty. Crucially, they show how speculation intensifies under conditions of crisis, rapid transformation, or foreclosed possibility, when actors turn toward markets, resources, and opportunities not because the path is clear but precisely because it is not. Appadurai (2013) pushes this further, arguing that anthropologists have yet to develop a sufficiently deep understanding of the everyday meanings of uncertainty, risk, and forecasting. For Appadurai, the future cannot be treated as a neutral or empty space to be planned by experts; instead, it must be understood as a cultural fact requiring democratic and imaginative engagement grounded in how different groups experience risk, hope, and possibility. This means opening up the contextual meanings of speculation to better understand how the sciences of anticipation interact with the everyday strategies and practices of future-making of individuals and communities. Bahng (2018) argues that speculation is a practice of world-making that is not exclusively interested in predicting the future but is equally compelled to explore different accounts of history, reimagining past, present, and future simultaneously.

If these frameworks locate speculation in the unresolved and the indeterminate, a parallel tradition in economic anthropology has worked to establish it as a generalized condition of life under contemporary capitalism. Bear (2020) argues that speculation names a broad form of future-oriented affective, physical, and intellectual labor that creates surplus value while remaining deeply embedded in structures of inequality organized around class, gender, and race. In everyday life, what Bear (2015) calls “popularist speculators” draw on what she terms “technologies of imagination”—tools and processes through which individuals and institutions anticipate, produce, and navigate uncertain futures. 

Anderson, Backe, Nelms, Reddy, & Trombley (2018), writing from the intersection of anthropology and speculative fiction, propose that this speculative orientation is also a mode of knowledge production. Speculative anthropology casts a critical eye toward futurity, confronts the world’s inclusions and exclusions from across imaginaries of difference, and challenges the taken-for-granted by pushing the boundaries of the individual, society, and the human. Rao, Krishnamurthy, and Kuoni (2015) also propose speculation as a methodology that accommodates the awareness that things could be different, one that embraces non-intentional contingencies, the unknowable, and the necessity of holding multiple possibilities in balance simultaneously. Such an approach, they argue, facilitates a commitment to the imaginary as a realm where multiple temporalities and conditions coexist. Taken together, these frameworks allow us to understand speculation as widespread, creative, and politically charged practice through which people make claims on futures that are structurally uncertain. It is in this expansive sense that we use the term here.

Comics, Research, and the Building of Speculative Worlds

Popular forms of speculative world-building in comics use the genres of science fiction and superhero comics. These comics feature speculative worlds full of mutations, new technologies, and extraterrestrial beings. In many cases, they even allow creators to spin new speculative world-building projects off the original, “canonical” narratives they inherit from other creators. This is evident in a long tradition of superhero comics exploring alternate premises, such as Batman hunting down Jack the Ripper in Victorian England (Augustyn and Mignola 1989), or a Wonder Woman who was raised in Hell (Thompson and Sherman 2024).

But this focus on corporate multiverses can obscure the ways that the comics medium itself lends itself to speculation. The cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud, a longtime advocate of nonlinear, playful uses of the comics page, created a collective exercise of speculation in his “Choose Your Own Carl” comics (1998–2000). Beginning with a single panel—in which the protagonist Carl promises his mother not to drink and drive—McCloud allowed readers of his blog to suggest the next panels, mapping the collaboratively generated, forking narratives people created for Carl into a nonlinear grid resembling a crossword puzzle.

Adam foregrounds speculation in a more gentle, rhythmic way in the pages below, from his in-progress graphic novel. The scene is from a long opening sequence where the book’s main character, Fairlawn, is searching for the grave of her childhood friend Kacey in an overgrown African American cemetery—a place resembling the field sites from Adam’s research.  Each of the page’s three panels names one speculative possibility, notions that occur to Fairlawn as she hunts through the weeds, hoping to find Kacey’s headstone. But each one ends in a “no,” as Fairlawn’s hopes of finding Kacey’s grave are gradually dashed. The final “no” uses a bit of wordplay, completing a sentence that we would expect to end with the word “know,” rather than “no,” to emphasize that Fairlawn is losing both her connection to a specific place to mourn Kacey—that Fairlawn now has no place, no body to materialize her grief—and her hopes of resolving the enduring pain of this not-knowing.

The Series

This post is part of a series of four essays on comics in the classroom and in the field. We each examine how comics helped us reimagine new forms of pedagogy, translating field notes into teachable moments, and how comics as a medium lends itself to the kinds of speculation we see our interlocutors doing in the field. We write from the respective positions we were in when we met, and the ways we use comics based on these positions: Adam as a longtime cartoonist and comics reader, Joanna as a PhD candidate currently undertaking a year of fieldwork in Northeastern India, and Federico wrapping up his coursework on Duke’s campus while doing some of his summer fieldwork. We struggled with this, because we wanted to collaborate non-hierarchically; none of us—especially not Adam—wanted to retain the same teacher-student roles we had occupied when we first met in the classroom, nor have Adam be the project’s “authority” on comics simply because he has been engaged with the medium for longer. But we also could not ignore the different stages we were at, both in our academic journeys and our engagements with comics as knowledge production. 

Ultimately, we decided we could collaborate in an egalitarian fashion while also writing from authentic experience. In fact, we decided to embrace the multidimensional view of comics-based research we could offer when one of us (Adam) was writing about using comics as a teaching method, one of us (Joanna) was in the midst of long-term fieldwork, and one of us (Federico) is actively honing the theories and questions he will bring to his work in the field. In this series, we are reporting on the “afterlife” of the graphic ethnography seminar that first brought us together: how it has reshaped our work as scholars and teachers and sparked a dialogue that we have continued beyond the semester’s end.