Original article: https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2026/22446 In the Structured Conversation by Iqani et al., the affiliation for Kevin Guyan was incorrectly given as the University of Glasgow. The correct affiliation for Kevin Guyan is: Business School, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Interdisciplinary conversations about how knowledge is produced are significant in that they allow for reflection and exchange between different research traditions. This Structured Conversation explores a range of views on how evidence is defined and deployed from four diverse disciplinary perspectives: international law, filmmaking and environmental communication, astrophysics, and psychology and disability studies.

Scholars have been exploring the potential of TikTok in facilitating health communication and activism separately, leaving a gap in understanding the political implications of health communication on TikTok. Filling this gap is important because it matters whether and how the communication mediated by the platform can translate into collective action to address the underlying health inequality issues. In response, we conducted a case study of TikTok videos about endometriosis diagnosis and treatment. Particularly, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of 713 comments beneath 36 videos that share medical gaslighting experiences in endometriosis diagnosis and treatment. We identified that the comments mainly focused on (1) sharing lived experience, (2) extending affirmation, appreciation, and gratitude, and (3) critiquing the medical system. Our findings evidenced the potential of TikTok in endometriosis advocacy while also revealing the limitations of comments as spaces that can lead to collective action.

AbstractDuring the COVID-19 pandemic citizens created their own artistic representations of public health messages. Tackling everything from the significance of R numbers, to being on guard for misinformation, these public health comics were shared across social media to thousands of followers. In this chapter we present findings from our UKRI/AHRC project ‘Comics in the time of COVID-19’ that analysed a sample of over 15,000 web-comics distributed on Instagram between March 2020 and March 2021. At their best, these comics amplified official public health messages, increased data comprehension, and led to more informed approaches to consuming and sharing digital media.

Chapter 5: Visual methods for depicting research can disrupt expert-layperson dichotomies by rendering hidden voices more equitably for emotive connections with readers (McGarrigle 2018), but the comics medium can also be used to dehumanise groups of people and function as propaganda exploiting viewers existing emotional attachment to political debates (Humphrey 2017). The political is captured, refined, or abstracted through different lenses and techniques, which can become hidden in aesthetic choices in data comics and unaddressed in the absence of critical reflectivity. Aesthetic choices in the visualisation of data and research is subject to access, equality, privilege, and bias; art created from research is a political statement reflecting creators' and commissioners' opinions and beliefs. This chapter examines data comics from a visual politics perspective to explore theoretical discussion of the benefits of the medium for research. Data comics, defined by Bach et al. (2017), are created and examined within and alongside the emerging fields Graphic Social Science, comics depicting social science research or findings (Carrigan 2017), and Graphic Medicine, comics and health(care) (Czerweic et al. 2015). This graphic essay presents an embodied argument for using a comics medium methodology for representing research, which not only defines theories related to data comics and visual politics but also leads readers through methodological considerations from a humanised perspective (Alamalhodaei et al. 2020). In order to address these tensions and practices, this graphic essay offers a brief overview of theories for humanising research through visualisation to contextualise the embodied methodological discussion over the potential of data comics. Data comics can represent complex arguments blending the subjective and objective elements of research through personal lived experiences of participants, experts, and researchers and findings and theoretical discussions. Scholars argue that these practices can dismantle power imbalances existing in disciplines and embrace complex personhood through pluralism, multiplicity, and narrative and visual contexts related to target audiences not the institutions that create or commission them (Alamalhodaei et al. 2020; Bleiker 2019; Redwood and Wedderburn 2019; Schlag and Geis 2017). The composite researcher, our protagonist in this chapter, explores these theories through two methodological case studies for critical arts-based enquiry: (1) creating data comics with participants, and (2) how researchers have used the comics medium to tell stories of their findings. The chapter concludes with practical methodological considerations for future research visualisation focused on confronting the political in the production process.

During the COVID-19 pandemic our lives became deeply entwined with data visualizations.​ Alongside authorial graphics produced by the world’s biggest health organisations and newspapers, citizens and artists also leveraged data visualization conventions to express the turbulent, strange experience of everyday life under the virus. In this chapter we introduce the rise of ‘COVID-19 data comics’ by bringing together emergent thinking in the areas of Graphic Medicine and data feminism. We situate these data comics in relation to recent calls for data to be more humanised (Kennedy and Hill 2017, Lupi 2017, D’Ignazio and Klein 2020, Alamalhodaei et al 2020). Drawing on case study examples gathered as part of our broader UKRI/AHRC Covid Comics research project, we argue that integrating data and comics in ways that humanise health experiences can be a powerful tool for public health communications, data literacy and health equity. The examples of best practice we share show how innovating public health messages around an ethos of empathy can help foster what Lulu Pinney (2020) calls “data know-how” -- a way of doing ‘data literacy’ out in the everyday world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has called for effective health communication strategies to better protect the public’s well-being, particularly over social media. Among various strategies, health-related comics, referred to as ‘graphic medicine’, were circulated on social media to communicate public health information and to share individuals’ struggles with mental health. Despite a growing body of research in the field of graphic medicine, studies on public responses to graphic medicine are rare, leaving a gap in understanding the feasibility of these comics for effective health communication over social media. To address this gap, this study focused on Instagram audience responses to graphic medicine posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic that were circulated on the platform. It used qualitative content analysis to study 334 comments on eleven comics related to mental health and 159 comments on ten comics related to vaccination. Findings evidence the feasibility of graphic medicine as a tool for health communication relating to showing empathy, contributing personal experiences and knowledge and understanding and elaborating on health-related knowledge, what we refer to as ‘health literacy’. Empirical implications of health communication through graphic medicine are discussed alongside the similarities and differences found in the comments relating to these two distinct COVID-19 issues.

Background This article presents a case study about the role of data in the CATO Institute’s Police Misconduct Reporting Project and reflects on what constitutes police violence. Analysis Augmenting this data aggregation work, the article turns to additional data projects focused on recording police crime and misconduct to gather a broader understanding of incidents of police violence beyond acts that cause death. Conclusion and implications It is only when we look at data on acts of violence that occur when an officer is on duty and off-duty, with or without a firearm, that a clearer sense of the traumatic cycle of policing can be understood. This way of looking at police data requires both broader practices of “copwatching,” as well as a broader definition of what counts as violence.

Corporatization of Higher Education has introduced new performance measurements as well as an acceleration of academic tasks creating working environments characterised by speed, pressure and stress. This paper discusses findings from a qualitative, feminist participatory action research (PAR) study undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of women academics at a modern, corporate university in England. The study illuminates how corporatized HE erodes faculty autonomy, degrades learning environments, damages professional satisfaction and health. Strategies for resistance and liberation developed through the PAR process are discussed.Key words: slow professor, corporatized academy, Higher Education.

Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the conditions under which such visual texts are generated, disseminated and thought to be of societal benefit. This book is a contribution to the multi-disciplined and multi-faceted conversation concerning the forms, uses and roles of data visualization in society. Do data visualizations do 'good' or 'bad'? Do they promote understanding and engagement, or do they do ideological work, privileging certain views of the world over others? The contributions in the book engage with these core questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

In recent years data visualization scholars and practitioners have drawn attention to the need for data to be humanized. In addition to making complex information more coherent, visualizations can work to incorporate empathy and help audiences connect to information. Addressing this call for humanizing data visualization, this chapter considers the emergent area of ‘data comics’, looking at how the new fields of graphic medicine and graphic social science deal with numeric data. We examine recent data comics from graphic medicine and graphic social science that exemplify the complexities and potential of presenting data in humanizing ways. Our discussion is framed around what we call the EMA framework, considering the Epistemic (knowledge and perspective), Methodological (ways of working), and Aesthetic (practices of representation).

To better understand the historical trajectory of the policing of Nuit Debout, in this article we argue that the reflexive relationship between police and protest tactics is heavily mediated by the presence of the press and by the emergence of digital technologies. Our analysis focuses on three sets of reflexive activist practice: (a) challenging media representations—the adaptations and innovations that respond to dominant media framing of police–protester relations; (b) “sousveillance” and police monitoring—the recording and monitoring of police violence and the public education around the police’s use of force; (c) civic forensics and data aggregation—the gathering, analyzing, and collectivizing of citizen-generated data. Although not intended as a taxonomy, these groups of practices are offered as conceptual lenses for critically examining how activists’ tactical repertoires for protesting police adapt and evolve, building on each other to challenge the representational, legal, and material dimensions of state power as it manifests in police–protester relations.

This chapter examines how the mainstream media reported Greenham and some of the strategies women used to subvert and challenge the dominant representations. It describes the term 'mainstream media' to include national as well as local television and print media that were produced, generally for profit, by trained journalists. The 'liberal, decent' Guardian offered the most national coverage of Greenham, and likewise was perhaps the most frequently discussed media source. While local papers outside of Newbury were often supportive of the peace camp, the content of the Newbury Weekly News was almost unilaterally negative and reactionary. The sporadic nature of television coverage was due to both the difficulties of 'capturing' Greenham for a news report and women's hesitations to inform the media of every action they planned. Women journalists' homophobia, as well as the homophobic media institutions in which they operate, also prevented them from forging alliances with Greenham women.