Conference Program

The objective of this paper is to critically discuss the impact and potential of a research-teaching project that places comics and visual storytelling at the core of a creative and participatory inquiry on girls’ perceptions of urban safety and the gendered livability of the city. The project was carried out with a group of graduate students in social work and was designed as a research-teaching initiative combining scientific research, academic teaching, and community engagement (Pellegrino 2018; Tarsia 2020). Within this framework, creative methods—and comics in particular—are conceived not merely as dissemination tools, but as methodological and pedagogical infrastructures that enable participation, reflexivity, and accessibility.

The project Che genere di città? - developed within the standing group ParTeR (Participatory Teaching & Research, University of Parma) - emerged as a deliberately non-securitarian response to student representatives’ claims for increased “security” in the city and on campus, particularly for women and girls. Rather than reinforcing dominant securitization discourses, the project aimed to challenge mainstream gender models and promote a culture of equality and non-violence. Drawing on feminist and critical literature on gender and urban space (Andreola & Muzzonigro 2024; Kern 2021; Valentine 1989, 1990), the project involved 104 students as both participants and co-researchers in six-month research and learning process. Activities included one creative workshop, 46 in-depth interviews, three art-based focus groups, and two collaborative art-based workshops conducted in close collaboration with a professional cartoonist.

Building on Giorgi et al. (2021), who highlight the use of creative methods across different stages of the research process, this paper focuses specifically on the pedagogical and participatory value of comics and illustration within research-teaching practices. First, it discusses how a creative workshop involving drawing, coloring, maps, and stickers was used as a didactic tool to collectively design the qualitative interview outlines.Second, it examines how the collaborative transformation of narrative interview data into comics functioned as a situated teaching and learning strategy for qualitative data analysis. Rather than treating comics as a mere visual translation of research findings, the process of co-creating illustrated narratives with a cartoonist was designed as a pedagogical device through which students were required to actively engage with core analytical practices, such as data selection, coding, abstraction, and interpretation.

In order to translate interview excerpts into visual sequences, students had to collectively decide which narratives, meanings, and emotions were analytically relevant, how to condense complex accounts into scenes, and how to represent power relations, spatial dynamics, and gendered experiences of safety through visual metaphors. This process made interpretative choices explicit, discussable, and contestable, thus fostering reflexivity and methodological awareness.

At the same time, the comics format enabled forms of participatory validation, as the visual narratives were shared and discussed with research participants, opening up a dialogical space in which interpretations could be confirmed, negotiated, or challenged. In this sense, comics operated simultaneously as a learning environment, an analytical tool, and a participatory research device, reinforcing the interconnection between teaching, research, and community engagement.