Indigenous ways of knowing for many Indigenous communities traditionally relied on experiential learning and oral tradition, unlike a Western-modeled school system (based on a curriculum); however, Indigenous groups post-contact have adapted traditional Indigenous ways of knowing to contemporary colonial pedagogies. Most recently, the use of comics have increased as a method to disseminate Indigenous knowledge, cultures, and stories to the body populous. Many Indigenous cultures used different medians to share their culture, spiritualty, and identities. Wintercounts, petroglyphs, and carvings are just a few of the ways. This paper explores the use of comics, using examples from MOONSHOT: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volumes 1 and 2 as an innovated Indigenous pedagogy, and its contribution in combating colonialism by reaching beyond communities to educate not only Indigenous people, but non-Indigenous people as well.

This cartoGraphic essay – in the form of a short story in five comic-book pages – has been inspired by the works of both academic scholars and comics authors, with neither academic nor comics sources playing a prevalent role in the composition of the story. On the contrary, they merged naturally, inspiring the ideation of the panels, the contents of both the texts and the drawings. The essay draws on years of bibliographical research in the interdisciplinary fields of literary geography and cartography and comic book geographies. It is informed by creative approaches to maps and by the post-representational and emergent theories in cartography. Comic book geographies have, indeed, demonstrated how comics can actually become an object of interest for spatial analysis and also – as I have tried to explain more thoroughly elsewhere – for cartographic theorists.

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter- geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities.

Recent scholarship in international relations (IR) and international political sociology (IPS) has made significant contributions to the study of images. Chief among such studies on visual politics has been the focus on popular visual media including cartoons, film, photography, and video games. This article takes a look at another prominent medium: the comic. Comics provide ample potential starting points for IR scholars and political sociologists; the comic's aesthetic qualities—the way in which it narrates geopolitical events to public audiences through condensed image-word relations—reveals a distinct politics of representation. Thus, the study of comics contributes to a better understanding of visuality—theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. This article complements existing work by engaging an example outside of familiar European-language contexts. It discusses a comic booklet that was published by the South Korean Ministry of National Defense in the aftermath of the sinking of the Cheonan, a navy vessel that was allegedly sunk by a North Korean torpedo in 2010. Recognizing comics as narrative sites of (geo)politics, the article explores the booklet's own way of seeing by discussing its dramatic structure and rhetorical devices. In this way, the article provides an exemplary reading of comics, which can serve as a conceptual basis for future studies in the field.

This chapter introduces the broad theoretical approach of the volume while connecting it to previous research on comics and migration. The chapter demonstrates that while a crucial aspect of comics in relation to migration is that the former represents the latter, there are several other practices, uses, and functions alongside representation that connect these two. The chapter suggests that when analysing the intersections of comics and migration, comics ought to be regarded in relation to a wide range of practices and considered in their respective cultural, social, and political contexts. Most of the chapter is devoted to mapping the current state of research on the entanglements of comics and migration and presenting the chapters of the volume. It foregrounds the following perspectives: cartooning and stereotypes, graphic life writing and identity, memory and trauma, witnessing and human rights, readerly engagements and empathy, advocacy and NGO-produced comics, comics workshops and self-expression, and comics in education. The modest proposal of the introductory chapter is that comics studies should move towards paying more attention to the multiple entanglements that comics in general – and comics and migration in particular – are involved in.

While “media geography” has coalesced in recent years as an identifiable subdiscipline of human geography, media geography did not emerge from a linear history, nor does it have a clearly defined or singular focus. Compiling this edition, participating in media geography networks at conferences and elsewhere, and teaching media at our respective institutions have all abundantly revealed that media geography is a subdiscipline with many different routes and trajectories. People come to identify as media geographers as a result of an interest in a particular medium such as film, television or radio, through the literature on the Internet and geographies of cyberspace, through critical and popular geopolitics, through questions of development and the digital divide, through media and cultural studies, through communication studies, through scholarship on the city and urban studies, and through GIS, the geoweb and geospatial technologies.Media geography intersects with social and cultural geography, development geography, political geography, feminist geography, economic geography and GIS. One of the major contributions of media productions, spaces and analyses are the opportunities they offer for providing an entryway into understanding places and communities that we may otherwise rarely, if ever encounter—but this can be problematic when the representative and/or desirable. The contributions in this collection pay close attention to such opportunities and challenges posed by a range of media formats, contexts and methods. These diverse entry points make for a rich emerging field in which a number of voices and perspectives are present. The field is further complicated and enriched by scholars in media studies who have turned to human geography and human geographic concepts, in order to take space, place and scale seriously in their analyses of media texts, industries and audiences. Given the diversity of the field, we thought it valuable as editors to write three position pieces that situate our work, and us personally, within the broader project represented by the scholars in this volume.

This introduction provides an overview of the two main themes of this special issue—contemporary cultural engagements with Asian geopolitics, and the roles played by new media and genres in shaping these geopolitical imaginations—as well as summaries of the following six articles.