Symposium: Drawing the Human

Abstract

What does it mean to be human today in our globalised, technologised and hypermediated world? How do our modes of cultural representation relate to, affect and effect the role of being human? This special issue of Law, Technology and Humans seeks to explore the form of the comic as one means to address these questions. Comics are a means of cultural representation and discourse that not only reflect but refract — through their deployment of word and image, of grid and gutter, of both visual and textual mediation — the very means of human interaction and intersubjectivity. Arising out of the 2019 Graphic Justice Research Alliance conference, hosted by the School of Law and Criminology (now the School of Law and Society) at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, the papers collected here examine not only the way in which comics and graphic art present narratives of law and justice, or representations of human rights and their abuses, but also the way in which comics in their form and multimodality call into question the law’s drawing of the boundaries of the human as it is challenged by its relation to the non-human, the environment and technology.