September 12, 2018

Tillie Walden’s ′16 contribution

EL VIAJE MAS CARO/THE MOST COSTLY JOURNEY, CARTOONING AS A MEANS TO MITIGATE ISOLATION AND DESPAIR AMONG LATIN AMERICAN MIGRANT WORKERS ON VERMONT DAIRY FARMS.

El viaje mas caro is an ethnographically-grounded, applied cartooning project that creates graphic narratives to address mental health issues among Latin American migrant workers on Vermont dairy farms. Due in part to the cultural stigma surrounding open discussion of mental illness, project members sought to develop narrative-based outreach tools. As a culturally-appropriate form of communication in Latin America, particularly for a population with low literacy, cartooning emerged as the perfect medium for indirectly addressing mental health needs through storytelling.

With a background in environmental education and outdoor adventure, Julia Doucet came to nursing as a second career. For the past six years Julia has used her experience in program design and development to try to understand and address the issues around access to healthcare experienced by the patients she works with at the Open Door Clinic, a free health clinic for adults without insurance. Her latest project, entitled El viaje más caro/The Most Costly Journey, is a collaborative storytelling initiative that uses personal narrative and participatory cartooning to address the stresses and mental health impacts of migration and immigration status. She also runs health outreach clinics on farms throughout Addison County, especially targeting migrant farm workers. She is conversational in Spanish and has lived and worked in Mexico and Central America. When not wading through cow manure or learning obscure medical terminology in Spanish, Julia enjoys chasing her two dogs on skis and is most content when surrounded by her husband and three daughters.

Andy Kolovos is a folklorist (PhD Indiana University) and archivist (MLS Indiana University) with a life-long love of comic books. He has an abiding interest in the use of folklore by cartoonists (for example Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Bill Willingham’s Fables, and the work of Dan Clowes and Evan Dorkin), and profound love for the formulaic aspects of genre-based storytelling in superhero, horror, romance, and crime comics. The work of comics journalists such as Joe Sacco and Emmanuel Guibert opened his eyes to the use of comics as a way of sharing the contemporary experiences of others–and by extension the potential of cartooning as a powerful means of ethnographic representation.

New Hampshire–based cartoonist, musician, and educator Marek Bennett leads discovery-based Comics Workshops for all ages throughout New England and the world beyond! His comics work includes his latest book, The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby (Comics Workshop, 2016); the local history webcomic Live Free and Draw!; the graphic novel travel memoir Slovakia: Fall in the Heart of Europe (2013), numerous community-specific mini-comics projects (such as serving as the Official Cartoonist of New Hampshire’s Weeks Act Centennial), the long-running Xeric Award-winning weekly newspaper strip Mimi’s Doughnuts, and more. His compositions, arrangements, performances, and musical research work appear in the albums Watershed by the Cold River Ranters (Wedgie Records, 2015) and Global Banjar! by the Hardtacks (2016).