« Un dessin vaut mieux qu’un long discours »

Les doctorant·e·s et leurs BD

Abstract

Among all possible means of expression, PhD students notably use comics as a support for their criticisms against their condition. In order to understand how and why they use comics, we question the reasons that led these young researchers to choose this particular way of representation as a medium to illustrate their everyday academic life. This article argues that there are two main reasons to explain this choice: on the one hand, PhD students’ relatively invisible position in the academic field encourages some of them to use comics to criticize their condition; on the other hand, this is due to comics’ peculiar semiotic processes, which allows to express ideas that cannot be expressed using standard academic writing. In addition, we will see that even though the choice of a non-academic mode of expression may foster the delegitimization of an already dominated fraction of a highly stratified field, comics prove to be a powerful tool for the production of a critical knowledge about this field.