Comics and Photography: The New Frontiers of the "Reverse Translation"

Anyone who was trained in Italy in the last decades of the 20th century will recall how central the debate around "quali(tative)" and "quanti(tative)" was at that time, when quantitative methods seemed to offer reassurance regarding the scientific credentials of a discipline still young and insecure in terms of its identity. The supremacy of the quantitative even though it is already from the 1970s that we witness a slow, and often contested, "revival of qualitative research linked to profound epistemological changes [...], to the crisis of the objectivist paradigm [...] and the recognition of the centrality of language [...] (Frisina, 2013)." However, it will only be with the new millennium that visual methods for social research, and later creative methods, will become a growing area of experimentation mainly among new generations. The strictly methodological debate on visual research usually focuses on conducting research on images and with images. However, there is a third dimension, which is the use of images—whether in the form of video, photos, or comics—to produce knowledge, disseminate research findings beyond academia, and raise awareness about certain social phenomena. Images, especially in a society of images, represent, in fact, that "reverse translation" that was invoked by Bourdieu to ensure that sociology can contribute to social change by making itself accessible. Comics certainly represent the new frontier of the new millennium, and it is this creative medium—an eccentric novelty in the field of academic research—that will be the focus of this contribution.