«Unflattening» e il battesimo dello sguardo. Nuovi orizzonti scopici per la ricerca accademica.
Additional information
Authors
Type
Journal Article
Year
2025
Language
Italian
Abstract
This contribution aims to explore the nature of images as sites of thought production and vehicles of epistemic knowledge, starting with the intriguing case of a young American researcher who, in 2014, wrote his doctoral thesis in Education of Interdisciplinary Studies in the form of a graphic essay. Unflattening : A Visual-Verbal Inquiry into Learning in Many Dimensions (2015) -- the title of Nick Sousanis's daring experiment -- serves as an attempt to provocatively break away from the centuries-old Western logocentrism, a paradigm deeply rooted in academia. It is precisely from within the institutional world that the author seeks to dismantle the notion, seemingly outdated, that human intellectual and communicative faculties are best realized through textual language alone ; a belief that has, for centuries, condemned humanity to a "flatness" which invalidates vision, narrowing and flattening cognitive horizons to the one-dimensionality of the written word. In contrast, Unflattening, leveraging the communicative power of images and drawing on the well-established tradition of Art-based research, offers readers an alternative path to canonical forms of academic expression, placing the graphic essay alongside the more traditional textbook.
Keywords
visual thinking, intertextuality, comic studies, art-based research
Journal
Colloquium Helveticum
Volume
54
Pages (or article number)
131–153
Diffusion
License
License undefined
Visibility
Public
