Dragana Radanović is a Doctoral researcher in Arts and Social sciences, working on her project in the Institute for Media Studies at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts. She completed her Master's studies in Visual arts, focusing on Graphic storytelling. Dragana is especially interested in children's literature regarding difficult topics, unconventional children's books and comics, and graphic narratives about marginalised experiences of the world.
Her practice-based research focuses on the representation of childhood in graphic narratives. Dragana has been investigating the conventions of using formal elements of comics to create adults' normative perspectives on childhood. She explores and challenges patterns that are currently dominating the discourse about childhood, through making a graphic novel about her early experiences of the bombing of Serbia in 1999. Her project explores the current gaze on childhood in society and challenges how we think and communicate about this life period. In 2020 it has been awarded FWO's fundamental research grant.
Redrawing Childhood:Rethinking Normative Ideas About Childhood Through Artistic Practice
The research reflects on the creation of autobiographical visual narratives about difficult childhood and its use as a way to engage with critical theory and art education. Our project examines how comic-making about memories of the artist allows us to rethink normative ideas about childhood, which always begin from assumptions about what children are not (yet) or must be.
For this experiment, we look specifically at the childhood war memories of an artist. The traditional image of childhood in war opposes 'normal childhood' expectations and, as a result, presents a limited narrative of the lives of war-affected children, often portraying them as individuals who had their childhoods interrupted or taken away. These limited narratives pose the risk of spreading a "single story" (Adichie, 2009), a story that makes it difficult to see these experiences as anything other than "lost," "stolen," or "pitiful." A repeated single story leaves no room for these childhoods to be similar to other childhoods, no room to react to these stories differently, or to feel emotions more complex than pity for these stories. However, as Nikolajeva (2009) suggests, radical themes, such as the artist's childhood war experiences, can create important conditions for questioning adult-child power relationships and presenting what is frequently left out of the dominant discourse on childhood. This work explores the creation of the artist's protocol to suspend her own normative gaze on childhood and to look again. It focuses on the initial stage of graphic narrative making and compares the conventional manuscript-driven approach to narrative creation with the proposed visual mapping approach. It shows how this stage of comic-making about childhood war experiences aids in envisioning childhood outside of the dominant aetonormative dichotomy. Finally, we propose using comics as a tool for non-linear thinking that allow us to perceive our experiences in a new light and make us more aware of the normative beliefs we adopt due to living in specific surroundings. This work presents how academic theory can be integrated into art education as a reflexive practice that facilitates seeing what has been neglected or eliminated within normative constructs of childhood.