Profs & Pints San Francisco: Thinking in Comics

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “Thinking in Comics,” a revolutionary discussion of the importance of visual thinking and the limitations of the written word, with Nick Sousanis, award-winning comics author, associate professor of interdisciplinary studies, and founder of the Comic Studies program at San Francisco State University.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/sf-thinking-in-comics .]

Western culture has along assumed the primacy of written words over images when it comes to conveying meaning. But what if our reliance on words limits our thinking, and knowledge constructed visually through images is inextricably linked to—and every bit as important as—knowledge conveyed verbally through words?

Nick Sousanis does not just assert such an idea, he staked his doctorate on it, producing his doctoral dissertation entirely in comic form. Eventually published as the 2015 book Unflattening, that bold work earned him an American Publishers Association Humanities award for Scholarly Excellence and a Lynd Ward prize for Best Graphic Novel. Reviewers praised it as insightful, far-reaching, and a persuasive call to rethink how we perceive the world and teach about it.

Join Dr. Sousanis at San Francisco’s Bartlett Hall Brewery for an evening in which he’ll challenge the forms of learning traditionally found in academic settings and demonstrate the importance of visual thinking in both the teaching and learning processes.

Drawing extensively from visual examples from his own work, he’ll discuss diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, and he’ll show you how perception is an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. He’ll help you rethink how you go about looking at the world and see the importance of producing knowledge in both verbal and visual forms.

Whether you’re a student seeking to learn better, an educator seeking to teach better, or simply someone open to new ways of thinking, you’ll emerge from the talk with a new perspective on the world. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30. Parking available nearby at the Mason O'Farrell garage.)

Image taken from a drawing by Nick Sousanis.