Narrative Empowerment through Comics Storytelling: Facilitating the Life Stories of the Intellectually Disabled

Abstract

In this essay I elaborate an approach to helping the intellectually disabled construct their own life narratives. The study brings together insights from several areas of research: autobiographical works that have been produced by intellectually disabled individuals, including life histories that have been generated through ethnographic approaches developed by anthropologists and sociologists; research on life stories, with particular attention to the ethical implications of collaborative “autobiography”; disability studies, with special emphasis on its applications to the intellectually disabled; and narrative theory, particularly recent work that has attempted to bring narratological concepts into dialogue with graphic narratives—that is, narratives that, assuming the form of comics or more extended graphic novels, are told via sequences of word-image combinations.