In Love With the Virus: Reducing Harm and Promoting Dignity through Graphic Narratives
Graphic Medicine uses comics and art to tell stories about health and illness. The graphic ethnography ‘The Virus’ took lived experiences of illicit drug use to encourage testing and treatment of Hepatitis C. In the process of creating this comic, the collaborators—a social anthropologist, a graphic artist, and people sharing their drug use experiences—forged a mode of ethical engagement, action, and activism. This masterclass with Aleksandra Bartoszko introduced participants to graphic medicine and graphic ethnography. By sharing her experiences of creating ‘The Virus,’ Bartoszko showed how medicine-related narratives can be presented to destabilize traditional ways of representing suffering and illness, thereby reducing harm and maintaining human dignity.
About the Social Anthropologist
Aleksandra Bartoszko is a social anthropologist and associate professor at VID Specialized University in Oslo, Norway. She has researched and published on addiction, legality, risk, disability, activism and social policy, with ethnographic fieldwork in Nicaragua and Norway. She developed methods and a new genre within anthropology—graphic ethnography and, among others, published an ethnographic comic The Virus, on injecting drug use and hepatitis C. She is deputy editor of the Journal of Extreme Anthropology. Her monograph Treating Heroin Addiction in Norway: The Pharmaceutical Other was just published in Routledge Studies in Health and Medical Anthropology.
