Dr. Biz Nijdam is co organizing a series of virtual roundtables as part of her work for the International Comic Arts Forum. The full ICAF 2020 Virtual Conference and Virtual Roundtable Series program can be viewed on their website.
The ICAF 2020 Virtual Conference and Virtual Roundtable Series:
Due to COVID-19, the International Comics Arts Forum (ICAF 2020) to be held concurrently with the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD, was canceled. However, we have reimagined a way for accepted ICAF panelists to make their contribution to ICAF and are organizing a series of online events to achieve the ICAF mission of celebrating comics through scholarship.
Over the next several months, ICAF will host a sequence of virtual panels featuring accepted ICAF presentations. All panelists who were accepted for ICAF 2020 have been welcomed to participate in our online programming with the intention of curating monthly virtual events around specific themes.
Each presenter on our virtual roundtable series has made a pre-recording of their presentation (roughly 10 or 15 minutes) to be posted online prior to the roundtable session, which will then be streaming live on the first Thursday of every month. We encouraged presenters to produce PowerPoint presentations with images and voiceovers (and an accompanying transcript), both for reasons of accessibility and for consistency. Then each presenter will participate in a live roundtable-style discussion of their research along with two or three other presenters for approximately one hour. In this live session, each presenter will give a 5 minute summary of their presentation, before the panelists, along with an ICAF moderator, explore those themes together. These live sessions will be recorded and subsequently posted by ICAF.
While there is no true substitution for the face-to-face version of ICAF, we hope that our 2020 virtual programming will generate the kind of participation and discussion ICAF is known for, while supporting the work of current members of the ICAF community and connecting comics scholars around the world.
For questions or comments, please reach out to Biz Nijdam at elizabeth.nijdam@gmail.com or Frank Bramlett at frank.bramlett@gmail.com.”
Featured image: Photo by Miika Laaksonen on Unsplash
