The Collaborative Process with Dr. Joe Young

We recently created a series of illustrations for political scientist Joe Young (American University) to be used as banners for his personal website. I had the privilege of working with Dr. Young on developing image descriptions that our artist, John DeLucca would use to create the banner images. Joe wanted the banner images to represent the major focuses of his research in political violence — terrorism, foreign fighters, torture, and asylum.

Dr. Young sent me a short synopsis of his work in each of those four categories, and I worked on how the images would represent these concepts and ideas. I decided that the concepts of foreign fighters and asylum seekers would be the best topics to explore visually without needing text. Dr. Young was onboard and wanted to make sure the foreign fighters represented those of his studies, namely fighters from the U.S., U.K., Ireland, and Brazil engaged in foreign conflict; so, the soldiers in the banner image have those specific flag patches. As for asylum seekers, Dr. Young wanted an image to represent how the state responds to asylum seekers — either acceptance or rejection with the use of violence. He also wanted to make sure that it would be conveyed that state violence against asylum seekers affects men, women, children, and families, as opposed to only men — because this feeds into negative, false stereotypes that asylum seekers are smugglers or violent militants.

This collaborative process between Dr. Young, myself, and John resulted in the beautiful images you see here — most credit to John though, who is incredibly talented at taking text and creating wonderful art. And this is a taste of what the process is like when we create comics for scholars, such as Dr. Young!