Drawing Oneself through Time: Investigating the Potentialities of Research Participant Narrative Drawings in Workshop Settings

Drawing, while not entirely absent as a method (as well as an object) of social research, is marginal even within visual methodologies. When it is used, it tends to be either integrated into 'data collection', especially in research with children and vulnerable subjects who are not considered capable of full verbal expression, or into dissemination beyond the scholarly essay. The recent development of comics-based research both draws on and seeks to extend and problematise the use of narrative drawings in particular as enabling different 'ways of seeing' and processing alongside the verbal (Sassatelli, 2024). This has contributed to an interest in drawing as an active, creative method - centred on process, participation and circularity - that is relevant at every stage of research, from question formulation to data collection, analysis and presentation (Pizzolati, 2022). With this in mind, in this paper we propose to report on a co-designed narrative drawing workshop conducted with students in two Italian universities. The drawing workshops were articulated in three parts: warm-up, narrative drawing, feedback. The student participants were involved in a process aimed at eliciting diachronic representations of past and future experiences, in which the narrative dimension is created through individual drawings, their sequence and the possibility of combining them with words, as well as with comments and a brief individual feedback interview. In exploring how this rapid way of constructing personal history works to elicit and unveil meanings and offer keys to understanding them, we highlight how layers of reflexivity were expressed, particularly in relation to emotions, relational life, routine/eventful storytelling. Alongside substantive reflections on the different modalities of representing and performing these biographical dimensions through drawing, the material also offers insights into the specificity of narrative drawing as a research tool in collective settings.