The (Super)Power of Comics, Zines, and More in the Religion Classroom

In response to the call for papers addressing Graphic Novels, Zines, and More in the Teaching of Religion, we propose a non-traditional roundtable demonstration and sharing of graphic novels, zines, comics, and Legos. Panelists will serve as conversation partners for attendees to exchange ideas on how to integrate these materials into their own courses. The panel engages multiple religious traditions, topics, and methodologies by including materials used in courses focused on religion and incarceration, American Muslim experiences, Black theology, trans experiences, creation theology, and Hindu sacred texts.

Each panelist will bring physical or digital examples of the non-traditional media they use in the classroom and station themselves around the room. In small groups, attendees can spend 15 minutes or so in conversation with each panelist, rotating around the room to visit different stations over the session period. Following these exchanges, our presenters will convene for the final 15 minutes to discuss the overarching approaches and insights that emerged from their interactions with attendees. We believe the conversation-station format will lend itself to a deeper dialogue on how these materials might work in each attendee’s specific courses, fields, lived identities, and institutional contexts.

Dr. James McGrath (Clarence L. Goodwin Chair, Dept. of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Butler University) will serve as presider for the session.

Dr. El/yse Ambrose (Assistant Professor, Dept. for the Study of Religion & Dept. of Black Study, University of California, Riverside) draws inspiration from Black zines in their assignment for collage and assemblage. Both processes involve integrating fragments to create a new whole, enabling students to engage in personal and experimental storytelling through images. This process invites students to critically analyze and interpret course material through their own creative lenses. An accessible kind of artmaking, these techniques aim towards creative and critical thinking, embodiment, contemplation, and imagination toward worldmaking otherwise.

Dr. Whitney Cox (Lecturer, Dept. of Philosophy and World Religions, Rowan University) will share Tim Tum – A Trans Jewish Zine and Post-Op Androgyne to discuss how her courses engage with these raw, personal takes on the trans experience in order to unveil a complicated, but ultimately positive, relationship between their trans creators and their religious identities.

Dr. Nell Shapiro Hawley (Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Religion, Vassar College) will bring examples of fan fiction and comics, including three renditions from the popular Amar Chitra Katha comic and a dystopian graphic novel, that she uses to introduce students to textual and performance traditions of the Sanskrit epic Rāmāyaṇa. Students learn to see these materials both as metaphor (understanding how malleable, creative, participatory, and popular the Rāmāyaṇa was in earlier periods) and as an object of study in and of itself (as valid installments of Rāmāyaṇa culture for readers today).

Dr. Rebecca Makas (Assistant Teaching Professor, Augustine and Culture Seminar Program, Villanova University) will share several zines that she uses when teaching Religion and Incarceration to highlight how using zines enables instructors to give more authentic space to communities with technological and spatial constraints (such as incarcerated individuals) and radical communities (such as prison abolitionists). Dr. Makas will bring two assignments: a collaborative activity that helps students conceptualize how incarceration necessitates sharing resources and negotiating limited space, and a final assignment option for creating a zine.

Dr. Elizabeth Sartell (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Theology, Lewis University) will share her experiences pairing issues of the comic series Ms. Marvel and episodes from its TV adaptation on Disney+ to demonstrate and cultivate discussions on intersectionality in her courses on Islam in America. Paired with a TED Talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the series opens discussion on embodiment of identity, and inspires students to reflect on the ways in which cultural, racial, gender, sexual, and religious identities – as well as super identities – intertwine in the lived experiences of comic book characters as well as in their own lives.

Dr. Hector Varela Rios (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova University) will lead a short teaching demonstration using Legos for understanding creation, and share a handout and resources about how the lesson supports theologizing creation. By literally building something in the classroom, students engage with both the limits and possibilities of innovation. Doing so facilitates conversations on anthropocentrism, interconnectedness, and evaluation of the “good.”

As conversation partners for attendees, our panelists hope to open up new possibilities for engaging with non-traditional material as “text” in religion courses. Comic books, zines, fan fiction, and “play” materials such as Legos serve multiple functions that enrich the religious studies classroom. First, because these materials are often created by members of marginalized communities, they allow an instructor to expand their syllabus to reflect the diversity of lived religious experiences more fully. In particular, they draw attention to the ways in which lived identities reflect (or not!) the experiences narrated through (traditional and non-traditional) religious literature. Second, they help students complicate a static separation between concepts such as reader/author and between canonicity/creativity, pushing toward a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which readers/viewers might participate in the creative nature of text and of canon. Third, these materials enable students to think critically about the flexible and dynamic nature of categories such as wonder or marvel, perspective, and interpretation. These lenses are important to an understanding of sacred stories as narrated years ago; however, they also demonstrate ways in which sacred stories are reflected, reread, and reimagined in a continuing, shared popular text tradition today. Finally, complicating these categories enables students to consider their own lived experiences, apply lenses of intersectionality and fuel their critical reflection on the ways religious identities and traditions intersect with social identities and communities.

As many of our panelists’ experiences demonstrate, students’ familiarity with these genres and the ease with which they navigate them allow for deeper engagement with the thematic, artistic, emotional, ethical, practical, and lived dimensions of each text or creation. Such analyses encourage students to consider ways in which each text makes meaning, and invite them to participate in that meaning-making process themselves.